Heart of Glass (24 page)

It was dark and crowded inside. A cigarette machine selling Pall Malls, Kools, Salems, and Philip Morris Commanders was just inside the door, next to a long, dark-wood bar with a white Formica top that ran along
the left side of the room until it bent back on itself at the opposite end forming a
J
. Small tables lined the opposite wall, creating a narrow path into the long room. The tables held black, molded ashtrays and candles in teardrop-shaped holders encased in plastic netting. A muted kung-fu movie played on a TV mounted on the wall over the bar. The band that had lured us in played at the end of the room against a fake-wood-paneled wall, where the light from a potato-chip machine cast an eerie glow on the drummer. In addition to the drummer and the saxophonist, an older African American woman played the organ with a tall glass beside her music stand. She was wearing a lilac-colored pantsuit and reading glasses on a gold chain around her neck.

We were halfway down the bar when David and I realized that we were the only white people in the place. David was wearing a seersucker jacket and white bucks, making him seem even whiter than he was already. As we moved along the bar, the bartender moved in the opposite direction. We stopped and tried to order a drink. The bartender ignored us, turning away. I started to feel a bit nervous, and after a full five minutes of waiting for the bartender to turn around and acknowledge us, I suggested that we leave and find another place.

David shook his head. “Listen to that sax, Wendy!”

He lit a Marlboro, placed it in one of the slots in the dirty ashtray on the bar, and planted himself on a stool. I sat down next to him. Another five minutes went by, and
although the sax was amazing, I still felt uneasy at our lack of a welcome.

“C'mon, David, I don't think he's gonna serve us.” I tugged on his sleeve to go.

“Sure he will.” David smoked and watched the organist riff on a passage of “Green Dolphin Street.”

Just as the song and the set ended, a tall black man wearing a powder-blue suit and a cowboy hat came in through the back of the bar. He talked to a few people as he made his way along the bend in the bar opposite us—clearly he was a regular. Just as he was about to sit, he noticed David and me and stopped talking. I was certain something bad was about to happen.

“Bill!” he shouted across the bar. “It's my man Bill!” he said to the people around him, gesturing at David as if he were an old friend. “Hey, how ya doin'?”

David nodded. “Good, good!” For a moment, even I thought maybe they knew each other. Then David shot me a wide-eyed look of wonder, and I knew that the guy was doing us a favor.

“How was church? I missed it myself,” the man said, adding to the people next to him, “He's from the church.”

David played along, saying that church was good, and then the man flagged down the bartender. “Reggie, get my man a drink! This is my man Bill. And who's your lovely lady?”

David introduced me and then the bartender came down, took our order—“Two bourbons on the rocks,
thanks”—and guided us to seats at the bar around the bend near our savior. With that one vote of confidence, it was as if we were regulars—fellow patrons began talking to us, and we were even invited to the funeral of a local jazz musician that Thursday. The guy sitting on the other side of us was the sax player's brother and a trumpeter himself. My apprehension faded into relief and happiness; I looked at David and it seemed as if we were under a magic spell.

“Let's hear it for Miss Goldie Hill on the Hammond organ!” Everyone clapped as Miss Goldie walked daintily up to the bar for a refill of her giant drink.

“Chivas, no ice,” she cooed to Reggie.

A man wearing a backpack came wandering in. The sax player's brother let out a small whistle under his breath. The man with the backpack was a well-known jazz singer and, according to our friend, was here to steal his brother's thunder: “And my stupid brother's just gonna let him.” The trumpeter got up and shook hands with the singer when he came around, and then the trumpeter stepped up to do a number with the group.

The singer sat down next to us at the bar and started talking animatedly about Miles Davis and jazz phrasing and the importance of integrity. After a few minutes, just as the trumpeter had predicted, the sax player made a big show of introducing the jazz singer and calling him up to perform. Neutral in the wars of the local jazz scene, we were able to just sit back and enjoy it.

The singer paused after his second song and announced,
“This is for that young couple at the bar, the two who look so very much in love.” He sang “My Funny Valentine” to us, transposing the words to fit the moment. “Don't change your hair for him, not if you care for him . . .”

We had to get up and dance on the stained red carpet next to the band, since they were playing a song for and, it seemed, about us. Trying to avoid a crater underneath the rug near the potato-chip machine, we stared into each other's eyes and again were alone in a crowd. It was like a dream or a fairy tale; each day was Valentine's Day. I knew suddenly something I'd suspected since we first met: David was the one.

After a magical weekend in Philadelphia, I headed to Rhode Island to start rehearsals for
Crimes of the Heart
. David and I promised to figure out ways to see each other, and we wrote letters and talked on the phone, cords stretched across our respective kitchens, to stay in touch.

Robin took the train down from Boston for opening night. We went to this funky hotel on the beach for drinks after the show and sat on the wraparound porch looking at the ocean. She'd dropped out of school again, but had made a short film about the fans of Elvis Presley, called
Elvis: I Love You Because
,
which she'd shot at Graceland the year before. Now her film was making the circuit—it had been shown at various festivals and had even won an award. I was happy to see her doing something she felt passionate about and was proud of her achievement.

“What about you?” she asked as she sipped her Rolling Rock.

“Well, I met someone.”

“Where did you meet him? Does he have a name?”

“I met him at an ecstasy party in New York. We stayed up all night and then walked like a hundred blocks down to the Village. It was magical, he's so romantic, like a character out of a novel. His name is David, and we are crazy in love.”

She eyed me skeptically.

“I honestly think this is it, you know? I feel like we're going to get married,” I gushed.

“O . . . kay. That's a little weird. I mean you just met this guy, and let's not forget you were on drugs at the time.”

I laughed. “It's not like that. I wish you could meet him.”

She smiled and looked at me as if I were crazy. “All right, whatever. Maybe I will someday.”

The show only ran Thursday through Sunday, so I had a few days off and drove up to see David and meet his whole family at a cabin on a lake in the Adirondacks. We were in separate rooms with thin walls and creaky beds, so intimacy was sort of impossible. His mother and father were kind, and, well . . . parental. They were certainly quite unlike my family—my rageful mother or even my dad and stepmom, who were more like a fun couple you'd meet at a cocktail party than parents. David's mother cooked and quilted, and his dad sat on the screened-in porch reading and smoking a pipe. His sister and brother were both younger, fresh faced, and uncomplicated—secure in their parents' love and support. No dark shadows collected in these corners. It made me love David more, seeing this
strong, beautiful group of people that he was a part of, that he had sprung from.

David taught me how to play cribbage, and we listened to the radio. In the evenings, we went skinny-dipping off the rocky point in the pitch blackness, the water making us numb with cold as we laughed and floated on our backs looking up at the stars. We'd climb back up the rocks to the house wrapped in towels and drink bourbon in front of the woodstove.

On my last night, we took a boom box out in the canoe. Django Reinhardt—just as we'd listened to the night we first met—music tinkled in the still, chilly air. I felt the urge to declare myself to him, to speak first.

“I'm in love with you.” My heart was so full of him, the night sky, and the perfectness of this moment.

A silence was followed by a more terrible one.

“You aren't in love with me?” I was stunned.

“It's just that I'm not sure. I'm sorry . . .” His voice trailed off, and all I could hear was the music, the water, and the soundless space that separated us for what seemed like the first time.

I started to cry—until that moment I'd believed that we felt exactly the same about each other. He rowed us back to the shore. I leaped out of the canoe and ran stumbling through the dark back up to the house. Back in my room, I sobbed into my pillow feeling foolish, crushed, and humiliated. It hurt so much, I wanted to die. Maybe Robin had been right, maybe it was the drugs.

The next day, I drove away to return to work in Rhode Island; he and his family stood in the driveway, waving and smiling at me as I bumped down the road. Watching them in my rearview mirror, my heart sinking, I felt miserable.

The show ran for three weeks—I asked David to come, but he never did. He had job interviews in New York and was filling out applications to graduate school. He had once, a few weeks into our summer romance, suggested that maybe he should move to Denver to be near me. I now saw that he was just a kid, three years younger than me, and he had many things to sort out: what he wanted to do, a job, where he wanted to live. He was floundering. So when he telephoned me to tell me he was going back to his old girlfriend, that she had begged him not to see me anymore and he felt she deserved another chance, I wasn't surprised. I got his call while I was in the bathtub at Ninety-seventh Street. I made it easy for him, as if I were the older, more together one who was cutting him loose—not some snot-nosed college boy dumping me. It was quite a piece of acting, pretending it was no big deal, that there were no hard feelings, but when I hung up the phone, I cried my eyes out. I had believed that he loved me, but it had all been an illusion. My heart was broken. I hadn't doubted, I hadn't fought or worried. I had let this love crash into me and sweep me along like a riptide. And now I was nowhere. Alone and far from shore.

•   •   •

I limped back to Denver for my final year of school. My last year at the NTC would be an apprenticeship in the company with a small stipend to live on. Some people in our class were lucky enough to get decent-sized parts; the others were in crowd scenes, the chorus, or assigned as understudies.

In my first role of the season, I was a dancing and singing Nurse #3 in
South Pacific
, the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical based on James Michener's book
Tales of the South Pacific
. Learning dance routines had never been my forte, which became clear during rehearsals with the celebrated African American choreographer Donald McKayle, who had worked with greats such as Alvin Ailey and Martha Graham among others, and whose work had appeared in films, on television, and on Broadway. The dance studio had oxygen tanks, in case someone overdid it and passed out from the altitude, which was easy to do. I hoofed around and sang, pushing hospital equipment with the other nurses, washing that man right out of our hair, struggling to hit my marks and keep in time with the other actresses in the scene. I'm sure it showed that I was playing keep up; Donald took me aside the first day and said that I shouldn't worry.

“Wendy, when I'm done with you, I'll have you dancing like a flea on a griddle!” he cackled.

He was kind and patient, and eventually—I got it. When we got into technical rehearsals, however, the director of the show, Donovan Marley—who had made the dire announcement about our class being cleaved in twain two years
previously—put glasses on me and stuck me in the back row. I didn't care.

It was an over-the-top production—Dino De Laurentiis meets World War II, with onstage explosions and towering stacks of oil barrels careening around the stage during set changes. Actors falling off or being hit by scenery or large wooden crates being tossed around resulted in many trips to the ER. The theater began to gain a reputation for not putting safety first.

In the second production, I played one of four muck-covered, barefoot Irish village girls in
Playboy of the Western World
. I only had four lines, but the play was a gas nevertheless because my dad played the Playboy's father. When I cut the bottom of my foot open on a nail dancing onstage one night and was whisked away to the hospital, the stage manager made it clear he expected me to return to the show the next day and presumably do the Irish jig with stitches in my foot. My father came to my defense, and I was given a few days off to recover. I knew my understudy, Paula—one of my classmates who'd gotten shafted in her casting for the season—was dying to go on for me.

Daddy's and my last time onstage together in
Dear Ruth
had been a peak experience for me and a lovefest for both of us. I adored my dad, but in the last few years I had started to feel angry and disappointed in him. Having grown up without my father, I had created an idealized version of him, a myth as wonderful and inaccessible as any. After reuniting and spending some time with him off the pedestal, I began
to see that my dad was ordinary, with foibles and faults. This kind of revelation hits most people as teens trying to rebel and push away from their parents. But I had spent my teenage years dreaming of being closer to my father, so it felt as if all of the natural father/daughter dynamics were compressed into a much shorter time. He was vague and forgetful; he drank too much and sent me flowers on my birthday, but only at the last minute, after I'd become convinced he'd forgotten. It seemed to me that he only paid attention when I was standing right in front of him.