Heart of Glass (20 page)

He invited me out to dinner, which neither of us ate because we were so distracted by each other. We were like a screwball-comedy movie team with a quick back-and-forth banter to all our conversations. After he paid the check, we walked out to his car, and once inside, a marathon make-out session started—we each could scarcely breathe; it was as if we were inhaling each other. He drove me home, and I was surprised when he didn't want to come inside. It was for the best, even though I just wanted to throw him down
on the car seat and fuck his brains out. He wanted to take it slow, and I was eager to keep our relationship a secret—for now—which only added to the thrill of it all.

Back at school, we students danced, sang, learned ­phonetics—which seemed useless to me—practiced our
a
's and
o
's, and had Alexander technique with teacher Michael Johnson-Chase, whom we called MJC for short. I learned that F. Matthias Alexander was an Australian actor born in 1869 who started having vocal problems while he recited his speeches. He stood in front of a set of mirrors to try to figure out what was causing him to lose his voice. He observed that he pulled his head back and lowered his chin when he spoke—MJC called this “chicken necking”—which pinched his larynx. He developed a method, which became famous internationally, of correctly balancing his head on top of his torso, which then led Alexander to discover that the entire spine could be lengthened—allowing a postural flow to the body. We all ran around school with our heads floating on the tops of our spines.

Jeff and I performed the George and Emily scene from
Our Town
in which they walk to the soda shop and she tells him how stuck-up she thinks he's become. It went fairly well—and it was Ethan's favorite play.

“There's a reason this play gets performed all the time—it's iconic.
Our Town
is like ground zero, man. It's life, death, and that fucker time. I'm telling ya, if actors connected with this piece, it would heal a lot of shit we encounter along the way.” Ethan listed around the room, pulling on his cigarette,
holding a Styrofoam cup—the contents of which I couldn't guess. “Wendy, you really have to cry in the scene—confront him, you are so pissed off at him. Let him have it, you know?”

Ethan pulled me into the corner and asked me what I found attractive about Jeff. I said his hands, which were large and soft with thick, long fingers. Then Ethan took Jeff aside and whispered something to him. Jeff nodded.

We did the scene again, and Ethan seemed pleased. “At the end, you know, I was really beginning to see the soda shop.” He smiled as he said it. Praise from Ethan—our leader! I was over the moon.

•   •   •

My stepmother and I usually got together once a month—she often treated me to lunch or dinner out, a welcome respite from my student fare. That October we met at the Café Promenade—a charming old-school restaurant in Larimer Square, a trendy shopping district in downtown Denver. The maître d', Fred, always made a fuss over her. He reminded me a bit of Jackie Gleason. Though very overweight, he moved like a dancer, dressed nattily, and was so incredibly charming that you almost didn't notice his size.

“Mrs. Lawless and Miss Lawless! How wonderful to see you, come right this way,” Fred boomed, showing us to a corner table, theatrically waving our menus in his gigantic hands as he waddled across the room.

Because Sarah and Daddy were living in different cities, rumors were flying around the regional-theater community
that they were separated and even getting divorced. My stepmother found this hilarious.

“It's ridiculous, isn't it?” she said over lunch after Fred left us. “I'm telling you, it's the most perfect way to be married. I think Katharine Hepburn said something once about how couples should live next door to each other and just visit now and then.” Sarah laughed and lit a cigarette. I couldn't help but think of my mother's long-term affair with my ex-stepdad, after their divorce. After we had moved to London and he had remarried, they rekindled their romance—as if the distance of an ocean between them had made it easier to be together. Maybe being in a part-time, commuter relationship was the key to happiness—tethered together instead of handcuffed, with enough room to keep longing alive.

Sarah switched topics. “So how is school going, cookie?”

I filled her in on my classes, my favorite teachers—Bonnie, Ethan, and MJC. I didn't mention Ned; I was worried that she'd think I was a floozy, or that I wasn't taking my studies seriously enough.

“Well, I've certainly noticed a change in you since you've been at the conservatory. You're so focused and sparkling. It's wonderful to see.” She smiled and gave my hand a little squeeze.

“Really?”

“Yes.” She sipped her glass of red wine and looked at me intently. “I've been meaning to tell you for a while that your father and I think of you as the child we would have had together.”

“Thanks, Sarah. That makes me very happy.” I meant it, but I also felt a tinge of guilt about being favored over my sister.

After she'd paid the check, we walked out of the restaurant into the chilly evening.

“I'll see you soon. Always feel free to come by my office, okay?” She hugged me.

•   •   •

I was working with Graham on a scene from a dated kitchen-sink drama called
A Hatful of Rain
. He played Polo, the supposedly no-good brother of my character's—Celia's—junkie husband. Polo is in love with Celia, and she is pregnant with his brother's child, so the scene is loaded with tension and the unsaid, and both our characters experience a meltdown. We rehearsed in my kitchen late at night.

After we ran it a few times, we were both sort of jazzed by all the conflict in the scene—I'm supposed to throw a glass of water in his face, and he confesses that he loves me.

“I thought that went pretty well—you?” I was trembling slightly.

“Yeah. I have to tell you something.”

“What?”

“I'm crazy about you.”

“What?” I sputtered.

This seemed preposterous to me. Graham had a gorgeous girlfriend, Liz, who was the star ingenue in the company—he could have any girl he wanted. He was good-looking in a
conventional, strapping, telegenic way, with broad shoulders and a head of thick brown hair. I'm sure it upset him that his all-American looks and build caused people to regard him in a sex-slob way. Everyone probably thought he'd just move to Los Angeles after school and become the next Tom Selleck. But he wanted to be a serious actor and worked hard at his craft.

“You're kidding, right?” Completely shocked, I couldn't believe he was serious. “I mean, what about you and Liz?”

“I never wanted it to be serious. She feels differently, so it's a problem. She kind of hates me right now.” He glowered and looked at the linoleum.

“I'm really flattered,” I blustered on, trying to avoid sounding insensitive by telling him I thought he was nuts. “I think your feelings are coming from working on the scene, you're projecting them onto me. But it's not . . . me, you know?” Falling for your scene partner, at least temporarily, was common. I was sure that this phenomenon, combined with all the information we were being bombarded with at school, had caused his temporary insanity.

“I don't know what else to say. If you think that, okay, but I'm in love with you.”

“I'm sorry, Graham. I really like you. I hope we can still be chums.”

He put on his long, herringbone-tweed coat, wrapped a tartan scarf around his neck, and stuffed his script into his pocket. He strode purposefully to the door and turned back to me. He looked miserable. “If this is all upsetting to you,
well, think about how I feel.” He threw open the door and left with a slam.

What the fuck?
I thought. I just wasn't the kind of girl who had more than one guy running after her. The last time this had happened to me was at the Town School in Manhattan, when Tommy Rosenberg and Arthur Flatto had both professed undying love for me. I was seven. So it had been a while.

I threw myself into classes: ballet, singing, voice. Novem­ber arrived, and we were all cast in projects. One group would be doing Lanford Wilson's
Balm in Gilead
, which Ethan would direct, and Ned would be directing Tennessee Williams's
The Glass Menagerie
for the other group. Ned had told me, in secret, that he wanted to cast me as Laura, the fragile sister of the main character, Tom. I was thrilled that he thought I could do it—I wasn't sure I could myself, and it scared me. I was also unsure he could pull it off and worried that it wasn't a good idea, considering our relationship. But the casting lists went up—and I was to play the part. My classmate Leslie was to play Amanda Wingfield, Graham was cast as her son, Tom, and JB as the gentleman caller.

We worked hard learning our lines but also did a fair amount of improvisation in rehearsals. We cooked dinner and ate together as the Wingfield family. We went out on an excursion, and I shoplifted a little bottle of pink nail polish at the drugstore, thinking it would be good to have a secret—one that could be discovered in a way similar to Amanda's discovery that Laura has not been attending her
typing lessons. I worked with MJC in Alexander class on Laura's physicality—she had pleurisy as a child and has a pronounced limp, another reason for her fear of people and the outside world. I scribbled in a notebook, answering all the questions Ethan had told us we must answer when working on a character: Who am I? What's around me? What time is it? It was a new approach for me, and I relished the process. For the first time in my life, I was working to build a character from the inside out, instead of simply projecting my own past onto her or just playing pretend as I went along.

On the weekends, Ned and I would often go off on an adventure. Not ready to out our relationship at school, we usually drove into the mountains, where there was little chance of running into anyone we knew. We drove to Central City one weekend, an old mining town that was now a quaint tourist attraction with original storefronts from the 1850s lining the streets. We had Bloody Marys at the Teller House bar, where the famous portrait of a beautiful woman looks up at you from the barroom floor. Next door was the opera house, built in 1878, where Buffalo Bill had once performed and P. T. Barnum had presented his circus. Once we drove to Estes Park and ate corned-beef sandwiches at the Stanley Hotel—a supposedly haunted hotel that had inspired Stephen King to write
The Shining
. We had fun wherever we went, so much so that people stared and pointed at us. I was head over heels in love with him and told him all the time, and he told me he loved me, too. It was as if my blood moved faster when I was with him. He was always buying
me thoughtful gifts—a copy of my favorite children's book,
Eloise
, a red bomber jacket that I'd admired in a store one day, and a thin, beaded silver friendship bracelet.

But our sex life was kind of a letdown. With all the intense feelings we had for each other, it didn't seem to translate into amazing sex. We'd spent what seemed like weeks doing what my mother would have called “heavy petting.” I had rug burns on my ass from rolling around naked on the floor in front of the fireplace at his apartment, a sort of consolation prize for waiting for things to get to the next level.

He was a fantastic kisser and generous in bed, but when it came to the actual mechanics—he had trouble. The first time we were together, at my apartment, he couldn't get hard. I didn't know how to react, having never encountered this before—unless the guy was fall-down drunk.

“Is it me?”

“No, no, it's not.”

He got out of bed and sat on the floor next to me.

“It doesn't matter. I mean, we can do other stuff.” I didn't want him to think I thought it was a big deal—like lack of penetration was a deal breaker. I smiled while he looked down at the floor. Maybe this was why he'd wanted to take it slow and not jump into bed right away. I couldn't ask him.

We were entering the holiday season—which I always had mixed emotions about. My stepsisters and my dad would be flying out to spend Christmas in Denver. I started to hear an old sound in my head, the usual dread I experienced as the holidays approached. I knew my sister
wasn't coming—she'd told me it was too painful for her and she planned to stay in Boston with her friends—and I understood, but I felt deserted by her, by her choice to spend Christmas with someone other than me. Ned invited me to go with him to visit his parents in New Jersey. No matter how much I wanted to run away, I knew that I never would. It ended up being fine—my stepmother taught me how to knit. I had fun with my stepsisters: we chatted, played cards, smoked, and drank bourbon. I didn't die. I tried hard to be a joiner and not feel outside the group. There were other people, friends of Daddy and Sarah's, and stragglers from the theater who had no place to go, so it felt more like a party than a holiday. But I missed Ned.

•   •   •

After the holiday break, school started back up, rehearsals continued. We had a new teacher for mask class, Craig Turner. Mask eluded me, it seemed so difficult and vast. When an actor puts one on, it's a way of vanishing into this other world—to the time of the Greeks—but every gesture is wildly magnified because the face is covered. Sometimes, in classes that intimidated me, such as mask, I threw something together at the last minute. Arriving only partially prepared, I could shrug off not being good and pretend it didn't matter to me.

My relationship with Ned, on the other hand, seemed effortless. We finally ventured out to the Wazee as a couple—our public debut—for a large gathering of students, actors
from the company, and a few of our teachers, including Ethan. People ogled and nudged elbows—a bit too much, I thought, as if we were suddenly back in high school. Ethan, noticing all the unwanted attention we were getting, shrugged his shoulders as if to say,
So what?
I appreciated the gesture. But I still felt self-conscious because Ned was my teacher and I didn't want anyone to think I was receiving preferential treatment. When someone introduced me as Jimmy Lawless's daughter, I balked a little, too, because I wanted to be judged on my talents, not thought of as someone who had an advantage because of her father or her boyfriend.