Heart of Glass (22 page)

The roller-coaster week at the conservatory was ­punctuated—of course—by a telephone call from my mother to the school. I was pulled out of class and informed that Cindy, a young Mormon woman who answered the school office phone, had spoken to Mother. Poor Cindy was distraught not only by my mother's tone but from her profuse and creative use of the F-word during their brief conversation. I rushed to the office and practically had to peel Karen, who ran the NTC's office, off the ceiling.

“Oh my God, your mother screamed at me! And cussed me out when I refused to bring you to the phone.” Karen was quite shaken, as many people were when they were confronted with Mother's tsunami of venom. It could be overwhelming, especially if it was the first time it had hit you.

“I'm really sorry, Karen. My mother is, um, well, she's nuts.”

“Jeez, she scared me to death! What a way to behave. Poor woman belongs in a hospital.”

Karen shook her head and hugged herself for comfort. I had no idea how Mother had found me. I had often wondered if someone, perhaps an old friend from Kansas City when my parents were first married, had stayed in touch with both of them after the divorce. Perhaps Mother had put in a phone call to her old friend Sylvia Browne, now a famous psychic. But I would never find out how she did it. Mother herself had always claimed to be telepathic; maybe she was. The poison phone call was just Mother's way of saying, “I know where you are. You can't hide from me.”

The final projects were cast later that week, with all of us preoccupied with how our performances would be the deciding factor in who would be asked back. Ned would be directing
Chekhov in Yalta
, a play about actors from the Moscow Art Theatre visiting Chekhov when he is sick with consumption; Allen had chosen to do Somerset Maugham's
Our Betters
—a 1923 satirical comedy of manners set in London about American expats marrying impoverished British nobility to increase their own social stature.

After trying so hard to change my good-girl image at school, I was hoping I'd get a meaty role, preferably not in Ned's show. So I was disappointed and devastated to be cast as the ingenue, Bessie, in
Our Betters
. Apparently, I was still considered a lightweight, and the character had a cow's name. Why had I bloody bothered to try to show my versatility? I thought briefly of going to Allen to beg him to recast me but knew it was too late for that.

One of my first pieces of direction from Allen was to
enter the room and bury my face in a bouquet of roses. My character was a total simp; I had to say lines like “I've just begun to live!” I looked up
ingenue
in the dictionary to prepare; it read, “An unsophisticated young woman.” My ambition to be taken seriously was screwed.

Graham was cast as Tony, the cad, a gigolo who chased women and drove fast cars. Plunging into one of his dark moods, he told me he was convinced that all those in
Our Betters
, or
Bed Wetters
, as we came to call it, were the people who were most likely to be cut from the class. Feeling despondent over my casting, I went back and forth about giving a shit if I was cut. I'd skipped class, turned in a lackluster performance as Laura, and was now saddled with this boring wallflower part. I figured if they cut me, screw them; I'd just move back to New York and live with Jenny and Pete. Then I would flip-flop back to wanting to be one of the twelve who got to stay, be with Graham, and continue my training.

Graham and I started arguing—maybe the stress of the impending class cut hanging over us made us feel tentative about our relationship. Only a few months of school were left—would we even still be living in the same city six months from now?

His black mood was worsened because he rarely had any extra money, was still dependent on his folks, and his roommate moved out suddenly, leaving him hanging. I tried to help him, but he seemed to resent the meals I cooked him—knowing that it might be the only meal he'd eat that day—as well as the cash I offered to lend him. Instead of being
appreciative, he was distant, and I thought just plain mean sometimes. He thought I overreacted to what I perceived as his withholding tendencies and his general thoughtlessness. He would stop himself from saying nice things to me—he rarely told me he loved me or even complimented me. Maybe it was my problem that I liked to be told I looked pretty or to have my boyfriend save me a chair in class. His behavior brought out the needy, insecure side of me. The more he pulled away, the more I wanted him. This feeling of being off my game, uncertain of what would happen from one day to the next, was a mirror of my relationship with my mother. That painful feeling of floating along waiting for the next slight, the next fight, was familiar. I knew how to do it; I was even good at it.

Soon after rehearsals started, I entered the dance studio to find Graham with Val, a Malibu Barbie type whom I didn't know that well, as she'd been in the other group. Luckily for her, she had been cast in the lead of
Our Betters
as a rapacious, man-eating socialite named Lady Pearl, who was carrying on behind her husband's back with Graham's character. Graham and Val were lying on mats next to each other with their faces turned toward each other. She was wearing a short skirt. He hardly noticed when I walked in; they appeared to be sharing some private joke. They were both laughing, she breathily, as I stood there, watching them “running lines.” I turned and walked out.

Later, I made the mistake of telling him I was miffed.

“What the hell are you talking about?” he fumed.

“You were lying on the ground together!” I didn't point out that nowhere in the script does anyone lie on the floor.

“We were rehearsing, for Christ sakes.”

“Do you enjoy all that giggling and gushing she does? Jesus, it's embarrassing.”

“We were doing the scene!” He stomped off.

Afterward, I was sorry I'd said anything. We sort of patched it up later; he said he thought I'd overreacted and I said I was entitled to my feelings. I told him he could be cruel at times and he agreed. “I know I gave you a hard time. I'm sorry.”

Part of me couldn't help but blame his attitude on his good looks—it was as if his whole life he'd been getting away with murder because he was handsome and charismatic, like a modern-day Hubbell Gardiner from
The Way We Were
. He was fucking Robert Redford, which made me the ugly duckling trying to hang on to him—like Barbra Streisand's character in the movie. I wasn't sure I was willing to stick it out as she had.

One evening a few days later, Graham borrowed my car, as his was in the shop. After he'd been gone for two and a half hours, I had this weird, sick feeling and walked straight to the Scotch N' Sirloin, a local bar where the actors in the company hung out. Maybe I'd inherited some of the clairvoyance my mother claimed, because parked right in front of the bar was my car with Graham and Val inside, in some sort of a clutch. He had his hands on her shoulders, and her face looked all dewy and drunk. I turned and started to walk
away, feeling as if I were going to puke, but also gratified that the crazy radar in my head had been right. Graham must have turned to see me. I heard him getting out of the car and heard Val screech as he threw her out of my car onto the sidewalk. He chased after me.

“Wendy, I love you!” he shouted at my back.

Funny time to tell me,
I thought. I kept walking

“Wendy, stop! It's you that I love!”

He caught up with me and grabbed my shoulders to turn me around to face him.

“Is that why you're in my car with another woman?” I yelled.

He clutched me to his chest. I could hardly breathe.

“I'm in love with
you
!” his voice boomed through his chest into my ears. I tried to pull away from him, but he was so much stronger than me. I used my fists to punch his back, hitting him as hard as I could.

“I don't understand,” I screamed. I continued flailing at him and exhausted myself breaking away from him. I ran home through the alley.

Then, as if by magic, Val suddenly vanished. A rumor started circulating that Ethan had been having an affair with her. He slunk conveniently out of town and back to his wife and kids; she just disappeared. I sort of felt sorry for Val; it was hard to imagine what would happen to her now. With her beauty-contestant looks and her slatternly ways, she seemed headed for a career as a game-show hostess or a trophy wife. We never saw her again. As everyone huddled by
the soda machine in the hallway and discussed Val's fate, I was annoyed that Graham seemed to be concerned for her. I returned all his belongings from my apartment by dumping them on his front porch, which felt really good.
What an asshole,
I thought.

The next day, Allen announced that I would be taking over the role of Lady Pearl. I was terrified—but I also knew I could do it and that it was my chance to show the faculty what I was capable of. Or so I hoped. My classmate Reenie was moved into my old ingenue role, and we started all over again. Lady Pearl was a delicious part; she was a complete reprobate, a conniving snob, and a gold digger. She reminded me of my mother, so it was easy to channel her. I wore vintage dresses to rehearsal and carried an elegant carved silver cigarette holder. The role came naturally, and for the first time since being at NTC, I felt I was filling my space. I was grounded and sure-footed.

Two days later, I walked into the building, pressed the elevator button to go up, and felt something was amiss. In an eerie quiet I walked down the hallway and into the rehearsal room. Ned was there, looking somber. I took a seat and waited in silence for everyone else to arrive. When we'd all sat down, Ned told us that Allen was in the hospital. He had always looked frail, but this was sudden. He had a rare blood disorder, had contracted pneumonia, and had some sort of wound on his ankle that wouldn't heal. I knew he wouldn't be coming back. Ned would be taking over the
last ten days of rehearsal, in addition to his own project with the other half of the class.

We did the play. In my critique, a teacher (whom I loathed and whose voice class I skipped often because he told us to breathe through our assholes) said my performance was “professional” and he marveled why I had slacked off the year. I had high marks from everyone—many of them surprised I had the role in me. Still, I wasn't sure that pulling off a strong performance at the last minute would be enough to save my ass. Other people had worked a lot harder than I had.

The next few weeks were ruled by an electric anxiety you could practically taste as we all waited for the big showdown. Who would be chucked out, and who would make up the ­second-year class? When the day came, we were informed in alphabetical order. Everyone paced in the hall, waiting his or her turn to the guillotine. I went in to Karen's office to see Bonnie and Michael. They told me I wasn't being cut, but that I had just squeezed by. I started crying and got up to leave.

“I think that actors are the bravest people in the world,” I sobbed, before joining the group downstairs in the lobby.

The hardest lot was reserved for the people toward the end of the alphabet—when Jen, whose last name began with a
W
, heard M.E. crying, she knew M.E. had been cut and she was getting the last remaining woman's slot.

I had made it. It was ugly, and maybe I'd been saved at the last minute by wowing everyone with my portrayal of
the reprehensible Lady Pearl, but it felt good. I may not have been sure of who I was yet or where exactly I belonged, but I felt for once I'd played my hand well. I'd wanted a spot and I got it. For once I felt that I had set my own rules.
Maybe home wasn't somewhere you found or were born into but something you made. And I had made this one—at least for now.

chapter nine

SLAVE TO LOVE

That summer, I packed up my apartment and moved into John and Jen's to house-sit. They would be gone for a large portion of the summer visiting family and taking a trip to Ireland. Oddly, Graham would be traveling with them to Europe in August. He seemed a rather unlikely traveling companion, and I didn't know how he could afford it, since he was always saying he was broke, but what did I know?

It had taken me about a month to wise up, but I broke up formally with Graham a month after school ended. After catching him with someone else, in my car, it seemed prudent to end it. I didn't feel that I could trust him. Despite his claim of having not really cheated on me that night, that it was me who he loved, Graham's attitude had hardened into an aloof and unkind dead calm. I wasn't his “physical type,” and that's why it was so difficult for him to be warm toward me. In other words, I wasn't attractive enough to warrant
his romantic attentions. Apparently, it was all my fault. Still, it was painful and made me miserable. After I ended it, he made a big deal about how we should be friends and that he didn't want me to think badly of him. It was as if all he cared about was that I didn't tell people the truth about what a dick he was.

Things were made a million times worse when none of the summer acting jobs I'd tried out for came through, and I was stuck with a gig at the theater selling season subscriptions over the phone, two cubicles away from the big dick. So I had to see him almost every day before he took off to meet up with John and Jen in Europe. I was cordial in the elevator, but I felt that he was always watching me from his cubicle. If Kafka had written a relationship guide, this would have been the breakup chapter.

Summer dragged on, and everybody left town except for me. I holed up at John and Jen's, listening to Bryan Ferry's new LP on cassette,
Boys and Girls
, playing “Slave to Love” over and over. And singing along to the lyrics: “Now spring is turning your face to mine, I can hear your laughter, I can see your smile.”

Feeling wretched and alone, I chain-smoked, killed John and Jen's fish, and drank all of their booze. I invented the scotch-and-M&M's diet and lost so much weight my hip bones stuck out and my arms looked like string beans. I found a copy of
Inside Daisy Clover
and read it over and over, identifying with the main character, a trailer-trash urchin with a crazy mom who becomes a movie star, but all she
­really wants is love. She makes the mistake of falling in love with a devilishly handsome matinee idol, but it turns out he's gay. I could relate to a lot in the story.

I took tryptophan to try to sleep at night, but usually couldn't and ended up watching old movies on TV or VCR tapes of screwball comedies starring Carole Lombard, James Stewart, Myrna Loy, and William Powell that I found in a bookcase.
Why can't life be like the movies?
I wondered, sitting in my borrowed, darkened living room.

At the end of the summer, driven crazy with boredom and forlorn at my solitary, too-thin state, I flew to New York to see Jenny and Pete. They were busy with plans to move to Buffalo so Pete could go to medical school, but my old room was waiting for me. I hung out there for a few weeks and helped them pack up their stuff, playing house again. On one of my last days in the city, I was standing in line at the stinky Red Apple grocery store, buying pasta for dinner and tampons for Jenny, when I grabbed a
People
magazine and started leafing through the lives of the rich and fabulous, many of whom—I felt sure—had never had to stoop to a job in phone sales. On the last page, where they usually had little tidbits of juicy news, or the next go-to celebrity hairdo, was an article about a movie that Frank Sinatra was set to star in, which was being produced by his daughter Tina. It was called
Somebody
Turn Off the Wind Machine
, based on a novel by Georgann Rea. I was thunderstruck. My mother's book was a thinly fictionalized account of a trip Robin and I had made with her to Kansas City in 1974 to see our can
tankerous and frosty grandfather before he succumbed to cancer. So Frank Sinatra was playing my grandfather, and JoBeth Williams was attached to star as Samantha, the gorgeous, bilingual, brilliant mother of two, the character my mother had based on herself. I was perturbed at the casting choice of Sinatra—my grandfather was more like the grouchy guy Henry Fonda played in
On Golden Pond
—but JoBeth would totally work. After my initial shock at seeing my mother's name in print, and a kind of strange, almost jealous dip in my stomach, I laughed. She'd spent years writing that damn book on her typewriter while torturing my sister and me, and now she was in a national magazine? It was like a sick joke, but still a joke. She worshipped Old Blue Eyes and craved money and attention. It was so exquisitely my mother; she always landed on her feet. I left the
People
at the checkout.

Right before I was to go back to Denver to start my second year at NTC, Graham called me. I was surprised when he asked me to meet him. His voice sounded so different; lighter somehow and happy to talk to me.

“Wendy, I need a favor.” He was in a pay phone about ten blocks away.

“How did you get my number?” Why was he calling?

“From John and Jen. So can you come?”

I knew I should say no. But I didn't. I couldn't help myself, like a little kid picking a scab. “Sure, I guess. What's up?”

“Well, I need to go shopping . . . for clothes.” He laughed. “So I was hoping you'd help me pick stuff out.”

He said he wanted me to meet him on Broadway and Eighty-sixth Street because he was staying at an aunt's house on the Upper East Side.

I met him about an hour later. He was standing on the street, wearing what he always wore—khaki pants, a striped button-down shirt, and worn gym shoes. His sleeves were rolled up, showing his tan arms. He was probably the only person who could go to Ireland and get a tan. He had a ragg wool sweater tied around his waist. I noticed that his clothes looked odd; they were ripped and stretched out, and his sweater had huge holes in it, as though he'd caught it on something sharp. His shirt was torn at both elbows.

I gave him a modest hug, then looked him up and down. “What's with the scarecrow routine?”

He told me that while he was in Ireland, he had saved a ten-year-old girl from drowning in the ocean. She was on a school trip when she fell through a blowhole in a cliff and down into the water below. Everyone stood there, watching her float out into the rough sea. Graham looked around, expecting someone from her group—an adult or a teacher—to jump in, but no one moved. He explained that many people in Ireland don't know how to swim. Watching the girl wailing with fear and being swept farther out from shore, John and Graham quickly discussed who was the stronger swimmer. Clearly it was Graham, who had grown up in California and was endowed with an almost supernatural outdoorsy zeal. So while John and Jen, the girl's teacher, and her classmates stood on the shore watching her flail about in the ice-
cold water screaming for help, Graham took off his shoes and dived in to save her. When he reached her, she was as cold as a stone and had already given up, having gone down a few times. Graham grabbed her in a lifeguard hold. The waves crashed on the beach, threatening to toss them into the rocks if they got caught in the tide. Graham towed her to a small rock outcrop close to shore, and everyone started tying their clothing together, making a sort of wet, woolen towline to bring her back to shore. Graham became a local hero, made all the Irish newspapers, and would be receiving a citation and a medal from the mayor of the small town in Ireland from which the girl hailed.

Stunned and impressed, I walked him to Banana Republic—telling all the people in the store why he needed new clothes; that his had been ruined rescuing a girl lost in the sea in Ireland.

“He saved her life!” I exclaimed to the smiling saleswoman. I basically picked out his usual uniform—he was like the guy in
The Fly
in this regard—a few pairs of chinos, some oxfords, and a couple of sweaters. He put on some of his new duds; the rest were wrapped in tissue and put in shopping bags by the adoring cashier.

“What an amazing thing you did! You are a brave man.” She beamed at him.

We walked out of the store, and he placed his old clothes in the garbage can on the corner of Broadway.

“Hey, you want to come over to my aunt's place? It has a killer view of the park.”

“Okay.”

We took a taxi across town to his aunt's; she was away someplace. The chichi building on Fifth Avenue had a uniformed doorman and shiny brass railings holding up a forest-green awning. I followed him through the apartment's vast foyer into the dining room, where a long, gleaming wooden table was surrounded by stately upholstered chairs. The rambling prewar flat had way too many rooms, all decked out in WASPy, Scalamandré fabrics, chinoiserie, crystal, and antiques. Where Nina's mom's apartment had been an au courant, brick-and-glass, 1970s, new-money pad, this was old money, ever so tastefully displayed above the elegant front yard that was Central Park. I was beginning to understand how a “broke” Graham could get to Europe for the summer.

He poured us each a large vodka, plopping ice cubes in from the bucket he had brought to the bar. The grown-up flat made me feel as if I were back in another time; the antiques, Persian rugs, and beautiful oil paintings reminded me of my childhood home at the Dakota. But I wasn't a child anymore. What the hell was going on? I had broken up with this man four months ago, suffered his cubicle surveillance; he was an asshole, and now I was in someone else's apartment, alone with him, with a giant tumbler of vodka in my hand in the afternoon.

I was guessing that all of this was some kind of passive bid to get me back. But you never knew—especially with him. It might just be a friendly shopping trip followed by a
drink at his aunt's sumptuous pad. We talked about his trip, my horrible long summer. Then neither of us spoke for a moment. I walked over to the window to look out over the dusky light on Fifth Avenue and the trees beyond the low stone wall that encloses the park.

“You know, when you marched in like a Trojan and proceeded to break up with me, I didn't know if I should kill you or kiss you.”

“I didn't know what else to do. You were so indifferent to me.” I shrugged.

He wordlessly took my glass from my hand and put it down on a side table and led me back to his bedroom. We didn't talk. He pulled me down on top of him on the luxurious bedspread as it grew dark outside. We kissed, and I decided this probably didn't mean anything. It was just easy, familiar.

Seeing him again had made me miss him. But as we rolled around on the bed, rubbing against each other, I real­ized that despite what I thought or hoped—that saving the little girl had miraculously changed him into a different ­person—it hadn't. I was the one who was open and offering myself to him, getting never quite enough in return because that's all he had to give. It was the same old story played over again.

“I think we should stop.” I got up and walked back into the dining room. He followed me, and we went back to our vodkas, looking out across the street at the trees trembling under the streetlights.

“I missed you,” he said. “I thought about you a lot.”

Really?
I wasn't sure that he meant it, or if I could believe it. I had never felt beautiful with him—not once. He couldn't accept my love or return it; something in him was broken.

“Graham, I just don't think we can ever be happy together,” I said to him in the dark room. “I can't help but think that we'd both be better off with other people.”

As my words faded from the air, I heard the slight whistle of his glass hurtling toward my head and then shattering on the window behind me. Glass, ice cubes, and vodka sluiced on the floor at my feet. I calmly put down my drink and walked out of the apartment.

In the cab on the way home it hit me—the raggedy clothes he had worn to meet me. He wore the fucking torn, sea-stretched clothes from his gallant rescue over a week ago and thousands of miles away! As if he'd been wearing them all this time. As if they were the only clothes he owned and he needed help getting new ones. And I'd fallen for it.
How dumb am I?
I thought. Then I realized: not that dumb—the saleswomen at Banana Republic had been fawning all over him as well. The story of the rescue was true, but everything else was bullshit. Except for one undeniable fact: he had totally played me.

•   •   •

At the end of the summer, as we were all heading back to start our second year of conservatory, Allen, who'd been in the hospital for five months and hadn't been improving,
passed away. Many people, including his wife, blamed the theater and its staff for his demise. He'd been working too hard, it was too much of a strain—not only had he been teaching acting, he was also directing main-stage productions, including a nearly four-hour production of
Hamlet
. They had worked him to death. Crazy rumors about the ­theater's having been built on a Native American burial ground started circulating among the students. All of the teachers whom Allen had brought with him refused to return, citing his harsh treatment at the hands of the administration. Ned would not be returning, either. Only Bonnie stayed—­everyone else would be new.

With no one to lead the school and time running out, the administration pulled in a married couple from the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco—combat teacher J. Steven White, who would be running the school for a year while a search was conducted for a new head, and the leading ingenue of ACT—Annette Bening, who'd now be in the company in Denver.

J. Steven was a swaggering macho guy who liked to quote Machiavelli and had a tendency toward malapropisms. He was short; perhaps this, combined with being married to the star actress in the company, made him overcompensate by being even more he-man in his behavior. On the first day, he made it clear that he thought we were all a bunch of babies, and—much worse—soft, out of shape. He was going to transform us into lean, mean acting machines by having us start aerobics. This was to make us strong, seriously buff,
and would hopefully increase our lung capacity. And he was going to teach us all how to fight onstage. Toughen us up. Pussies can't do Shakespeare, right?