Heart of Glass (13 page)

He took the cigarette out of his mouth. “Do you wanna dance?”

“Sure.”

Hand in hand, we strolled out onto the floor. It was a fast number, but he pulled me into him and held me close, looking right at my face, inches away from his. I could smell bourbon and cigarettes on his breath. As we moved slowly around, he took one of my hands in his and placed it against his chest, the other gripping me strongly across my waist. We were still looking into each other's eyes as the song ended around us.

“Wanna get outta here?” He didn't let go of me but moved his hand from my waist, up under the back of my sweater, and made my bare skin shiver.

I swallowed. “Okay,” I croaked.

“You got a place?”

I nodded. Once we began having rehearsals that ran especially late, Nina had kindly given me the keys to an empty studio apartment nearby so I wouldn't have to take the subway home after eleven or twelve o'clock at night—when the creeps, muggers, and jack-offs rode the trains, which often stopped in the tunnels inexplicably or were plunged into darkness when the lights cut out. The studio belonged to a friend of hers, an older character actor who was out on the road touring in a show. I had crashed there a few nights
already and even kept some clothes there so I could change for work at the deli the next morning.

“Just give me a minute,” Lincoln said.

He released me and went over to a booth to pick up his cigarettes and down the rest of his Jack Daniel's. He looked over at me and cocked his head in the direction of the door. I grabbed my stuff and followed him out, glancing quickly at his sister, who was immersed in a conversation with her current boyfriend, a successful actor named Paul who had the blond good looks of a California surfer.

Out on the street, I saw that it had rained and gotten cold while we were inside Dan Lynch's. I had a coat, but Lincoln didn't. He put his arms around me, burying his hands along with mine in the pockets of my coat, our breath fogging the air. We walked wordlessly over the metal doors in the sidewalks, banging past all the closed shops along Second Avenue. When we reached the building on Sixteenth Street, I ran up the steps and unlocked the outside door, then the inside door. Inside the first-floor apartment, I turned on a lamp, which cast a yellow glow on the threadbare Persian rug in front of the sofa. The place was minimally furnished by someone who didn't have a lot of money, but it was clean and tidy, with theater posters on the walls, an old, wooden rolltop desk, and plenty of books lining the shelves.

“So, have you brought other guys here?”

“Just you.” I took off my coat and tossed it nonchalantly on the sofa in my best woman-of-the-world manner.

“So I guess I'm lucky.”

“Well, that depends on how you look at it.”

Before anything happened and—I thought—much to his credit, he told me about his girlfriend. I'd seen her at rehearsals. Tall and pale, with red hair and glasses, she looked fragile, like a crushed flower. He loved her, didn't want to hurt her, he explained, but felt trapped and bored. I guessed this is where I was going to come in.

“It's fine with me,” I said, attempting to sound cavalier. I wasn't eager to have a serious relationship, I lied—telling him what I thought he wanted to hear—just so he would stay. I didn't tell him I was lonely, and that I fancied him, and that his interest made me feel wanted.

That night we drank a bottle of red wine we found and invented a new game, Strip Bongos. One person played the bongos, and one person took off an article of clothing. Then we switched. He left around three in the morning, heading back to Brooklyn to sneak in without being noticed. I could tell he felt guilty, but my dizzy logic told me that no one was getting hurt as long as his girlfriend didn't find out. His not being truly available made it easier in a way—knowing that whatever happened between us had a shelf life. I wouldn't have to give all of myself, to fall in love, with all the vulnerability that implied. I could keep a part of me hidden.

The show opened the following weekend, and because Nina was so well connected, a lot of important people came to see it—hot young actors she'd worked with or whom her actor boyfriend, Paul, knew, directors, and casting agents—some of whom asked me after the show if I was interested
in reading for film and television. I said yes, thrilled at all the attention. Being in
Spring Awakening
felt big-time to me, as if I were actually getting a taste of being a successful, in-demand actor. I liked the way it felt and yearned for more.

I called my dad after opening night to thank him for the telegram he'd sent me—it had read, hilariously, given the text of the play—“Break a hymen.” He was still playing Falstaff in
Henry IV, Part 1
at the Denver Center Theatre Company and wouldn't be able to see the show, and I was disappointed but understood; actors are not like regular people. You show up for every performance, and your understudy only goes on if you're dead.

When I got Dad on the phone, he said, “You're finally in a position where a lot of people will see how talented you are, sweetheart.”

“I hope so.”

“Just go out there every night and fuck 'em in the heart.”

Determined to do just that, I got an answering service—just like all the other serious New York actors—called Bells Are Ringing, to take my phone messages in case any of the muckety-mucks who saw the show tried to contact me. I regularly dashed into a phone booth to check if anyone had called. I was flattered by all the people who told me how good I was in the show, but how did I know they meant it? Maybe it was just my ability to cry on cue. The part felt so close to me, it was more like I was
being
this lost girl rather than
acting
her.

Nina had already been asked to assistant-direct a play on
Broadway the following month. I was happy for her, grateful to her for giving me this chance to be seen. Other actors in the
Spring Awakening
cast were booking jobs in regional theater and small films.

One casting agent, Meg Simon, was especially enthusiastic about my work in the play. She had this cascading mane of black ringlets and thick-framed glasses, and she always wore boldly colored retro dresses and chunky jewelry. Meg believed in me and was warm and funny, and I was drawn to her like a big sister.

She asked me to come to her office and told me she had me in mind for a few projects. “You remind of a young Katharine Hepburn. How old do you think you play on TV or film?”

I mumbled that I didn't know as I ogled all the posters on her office walls from the Broadway, Second Stage, and Lincoln Center shows she had cast.

She laughed. “Well, I'm looking for a young actress for a soap opera I cast. I'll send you there first.”

I thanked her, and she gave me a big hug.

A few days later, I read for the producers of
Ryan's Hope
, an ABC daytime show about a large Catholic, Irish American family who run a bar and live in Washington Heights. I knew the audition had gone well when I had a message on my service from Meg.

“They want to test you!” She was ebullient, as was I. “But first, you need an agent.”

Meg sent me out on meetings with agents who might
possibly be interested in negotiating my soap contract, in case I got the role. With an agreement in place, I would be locked in and couldn't back out or ask for more money. It seemed crazy to me that I'd be signing on for three years on the show before I even knew if I had the job, but I didn't have anything else going for me.

The first agent Meg sent me to was an incredibly odd woman. Probably in her forties, she resembled a wizened tortoise and reminded me of an old, lesbian babysitter of mine from long ago. During our meeting she said strange things and seemed obsessed with my glove size. She called that night to tell me she was just thinking about me when she was in the shower. I told her thanks, but Meg wanted me to meet a few other people.

Another agent, David Guc, took me out to dinner after the show one night. He invited me back to his house; he was sort of oily, sexless, and overweight. A powerful agent, he had many celebrity clients, so I went—I didn't get the feeling he was that into me. He kept going on and on about his newest client, a famous actress named Kathleen Turner, who he claimed was also his lover, something I found hard to believe looking at him.

He wanted to know if I had ever read Chekhov; I told him that I hadn't. He plucked a copy of
Three Sisters
out of his bookcase and gave it to me. “You should read this play. You were born to play Masha—you have her soul—but you probably will never play the part.”

When I asked him why not, he told me I was too sweet
looking, too cherubic, to be considered for “heavier” roles. I thought he was an arrogant prick.

My first appointment the next day was with someone named Didi Rea at the Susan Smith Agency. As I sat in the waiting room in my blue pin-striped suit, baby-blue shirt, and red-and-navy-striped skinny tie, I turned that name around in my brain, thinking that it sounded vaguely familiar, perhaps someone I'd met at a party. I dismissed the feeling and flipped through a magazine.

Then, when the assistant led me back to the office, I was face-to-face with my ex-stepsister Didi, the daughter my mother's second husband, Oliver Rea. I had not seen Didi, who was nine years older than me, since 1974, when I got drunk at El Morocco one night, danced with her older brother, Peter, to “Midnight at the Oasis,” and passed out in a cab. I'd been fourteen.

“Jesus Christ!” Didi stood bolt upright behind her desk.

“Omigod!” I couldn't believe I hadn't put it together that Didi Rea was her.

We hugged and laughed, and she sent the assistant out for a bottle of champagne to celebrate our reunion. While the girl was out getting the wine, we caught up. It had been seven years; she was married now and had a little girl. Her husband was a photographer, and they lived on West End Avenue in the Eighties near Fairway.

I didn't have that much in the way of news, except for the show and my upcoming screen test. Didi asked about my mother. I felt my face flush—it pained me to think of how
my mother had caused her parents to split up. “We're not really speaking right now,” I said. “She's living in Connecticut.”

I still felt, in a kind of guilt by association, that just being my mother's child made me somehow partially responsible for all the havoc she had created in other people's lives. I also knew that my mother was one of Didi's least favorite people. In fact, they had loathed each other openly. I couldn't say I blamed Didi—who would be happy about some young, pretty thing coming along and busting up your family?

The summer of 1967, the only one we all spent together as a family, we lived in Southampton. After the two divorces and our parents' marriage, Pop rented a huge house that belonged to Andy Warhol. The enormous, two-story, barnlike structure with an open floor plan had an entire wall of windows that moved on a track like a massive sliding glass door. Tall shrubbery enclosed a huge lawn in which stood plenty of good climbing trees. This cozy enclave was where we were supposed to get to know one another and blend as a family.

That summer, Pop spent the weekdays in the city at our apartment in the Dakota. I was never sure what he did for a job exactly, but the husbands stayed in town and sent their wives and children out to the Hamptons or Connecticut; that was just what people did then. On Friday evenings, while it was still light out, my mother would pick him up at the train station, sometimes with me, Robbie, and our youngest stepsister, Maggie—who was two years older than me—in tow in our nighties, already dressed for bed. We'd wait for the train and put pennies on the tracks to pick up
after they'd been squished into flat ovals by the train's steel wheels.

By the time Pop made his weekly appearance, the tension at the house that had been building all week was as thick as kudzu. My mother had enough trouble being a parent to Robbie and me—but throwing three more kids she barely knew into the mix, two of whom were opinionated teenagers, pushed her limits of patience. Maggie, only nine, was our playmate. We'd put the sound track to
Exodus
on the stereo and perform big dance numbers or play tag out on the immense lawn. Didi, who was sixteen and had a summer job at a pie shop in town, clashed the most with Mother, who incessantly nagged Didi about her smoking, her diet of Bazooka bubble gum and Jack Daniel's, and the general indifference and annoyance that Didi didn't bother to hide. Then Friday would come, and my mother would say icily to my stepsister, who had just changed out of her pink pie-shop uniform, “When your father gets here, everything will be fine.” Didi would merely smirk at her; I suspected she was saving up points to exact her revenge on Mother at a later date.

My stepbrother, Peter, was a whole different story. First, and most important to Mother, he was a man—so Mother set out to charm him. He seemed taken with her—one reason might have been that there was only an eleven-year difference in their ages. She was closer to his age than Pop's and she enjoyed the attention. Peter's girlfriend was pretty, coltish, without much going on between her ears—or so Mother claimed.

Further complicating Didi's and my potboiler summer was the drama of our now dismissed au pair, Michelle. Mother had hired her to watch us so she could go to Elizabeth Arden whenever she liked and to lunch and cocktail parties at the country club. Unfortunately, homely Michelle, who wore old-lady glasses and a mousy Dorothy Hamill hairdo, promptly fell in love with my stepbrother and, a few weeks later, ran into the ocean trying to kill herself because Peter didn't return her feelings. Luckily, she failed, but Mother fired her on the spot and called a taxi to take her away while she cried on her bed in the spare room.

Left with no help and severe limitations cramping her social life on the island, Mother fumed in the kitchen, turning out bland Midwestern dishes that Didi blatantly turned her nose up at and the rest of us listlessly pushed around on our plates.