Heart of Glass (25 page)

My friend, Patricia, who was my stepmother's administrative assistant at the theater, recommended a shrink named Marcus Pass. Patricia had become a fast friend to me; a blond Mia Farrow look-alike, nine years my senior, she'd become a single mom at nineteen, raising her son in a tiny town in the mountains. She also worked as a freelance photographer, and I sometimes worked for her, lugging her equipment to shoots or labeling slides. Once when I had confided to her that I was afraid I might be pregnant (a false alarm), I told her that maybe I had an unconscious desire to have a baby.

“Wend”—she'd looked at me wryly, tapping her cigarette on the brim of her ashtray—“you don't have an unconscious desire to have a baby. You have an unconscious desire to
be
a baby.”

She gave me Marcus Pass's number and said, “You have to stop putting your ego on the line every time, babe. Men are like streetcars—there'll be another one along in a minute.”

A large man in his early fifties stuffed into a rumpled,
blue pin-striped suit that barely contained his girth, Marcus Pass had a head of unwieldy, moppy brown hair that he often brushed out of his eyes with a plump, stubby-fingered hand. He had a wacky, confrontational therapy style. We met in his office, but also in cafés, hotel lobbies, on park benches, and sometimes even in his car while he drove around doing errands. When I first told him about my mother, he picked up the phone on the low side table next to the sofa we were sitting on and suggested we call her.

“What's her number?” He looked over at me questioningly.

“No!” I screeched.

“Until you can do that, pick up the phone and talk to her, you're not free. You must resolve this.”

He put the phone down and fiddled with his soup-stained tie, smoothing it over his enormous belly. “We all have our demons,” he sighed. “This is mine.” He patted his sizable tummy.

During my dad's time in Denver, I decided to ask him to go to see Marcus with me. To my surprise, he said yes right away. During our session, I talked about the dichotomy of my emotions toward my father: my deep love for him, the ways in which we seemed similar and shared a special kinship, but also about the darker side, my anger over what I perceived as being abandoned by him and his lack of engagement that left me feeling as if I was doing all the heavy lifting. Daddy listened patiently, nodding and basically agreeing with everything I said.

“You have every reason to be pissed off, sweetheart.” He sort of winced and smiled simultaneously. “But I love you very much, and I always will.”

At my next session with Marcus, held over lunch in a Mexican restaurant, he asked me how I thought it had gone with my dad. I told Marcus it had felt good to air some of my feelings, but it didn't look as if anything was going to change.

“It won't. But you can. Your father is a kind and gentle man who loves you. But it's not about him, it's about you. You need to accept what happened, realize that he is a limited person, and get what you need from him.”

“How do I do that?”

“By understanding that he did what he could. You know, the pain you went through in the past will always be there. But, over time, it will become smaller and more manageable.”

“Promise?”

“Yup. How about dessert? Churro?”

•   •   •

My best role in Denver that year was saved for the last slot in March. I had done a staged reading of Molly Newman's play
Shooting Stars
the year before. Set in the South in the 1950s, the play was about a women's trick basketball team on tour with their coach, a nasty, manipulative guy who ends up croaking onstage. The team then gets a chance to play “real” ball, and the ending shows them all bounding offstage to presumably pound the men's team into the ground. I had gotten a terrific response performing the role of Tammy, the
team's none-too-bright mascot. She loved fruitcake and her little brother, Bubba, and would tear up at the mention of her dear dead dachshund. I was fairly sure they would use me in the premiere production of the play—it was the main reason I'd chosen to return for my last year. Without that plum role, I would most likely have stayed in Manhattan and started looking for work. Two of my other classmates, Leslie and Anna, were in the cast, playing other girls on the team, and my acting teacher, Archie, played our coach, the evil Cassius—whom I got to discover onstage dead on the toilet dressed in a Santa suit. The play got strong notices in the local press that singled out my classmates and me for our performances. I even got a terrific mention in
Variety
.

Didi, my lost-then-found stepsister, flew out from New York to see the show, as she had promised she would the summer before. She took me to breakfast the next morning at the Brown Palace, one of the fanciest and oldest hotels in the city, a sandstone-and-red-granite behemoth built in 1892 with an atrium in the center. It reeked of old-frontier charm with its afternoon teas and debutante balls.

“So, have you thought about what you're going to do now?” Didi sipped her mimosa and pushed her Denver omelet around on her plate. I was busy devouring my Monte Cristo sandwich—a sort of fried
croque-monsieur
served with jelly.

I took a pause before answering. “I thought about going and checking out Seattle. They have a big theater scene there.”

Didi eyed me somewhat dubiously. “Do you actually know anyone there?”

“Um, no.”

“Have you had any offers from agents? That
Variety
review was fantastic.”

I told her I'd heard from two agents in New York, neither of whom had seen the show but had called the theater offering to represent me.

“Well, you are an exceptional actress, Wendy, and if you want to move back to Manhattan . . . I'll help you get started.”

“Wow, that's amazing. Thanks, Didi.”

“Of course, it also helps that you have training and look about fifteen. Both big commodities in New York right now. Do you have any money?”

“Not really, a bit left to me by my grandfather. Maybe a couple thousand dollars.”

“That's too bad; every actress should have a trust fund.” She laughed throatily. “We'll get you some work. Don't worry.”

She picked up the check. I wondered if she was just being nice; maybe she felt sorry for me being my mother's daughter—a woman she'd always despised. I drove her to the airport and said I'd be heading back to the city toward the end of the summer.

“Call me when you're settled, Gwendolyn.” She had taken to calling me this recently. I nodded and hugged her good-bye at the gate. I knew she would look out for me—for whatever reason. She was tough, loyal, and brash—good qualities in an agent. And in a friend.

chapter eleven

THE UNSINKABLE WENDY LAWLESS

Jenny and Pete were getting married.

Their wedding was to be in Cornwall, Connecticut, a beautiful, largely unspoiled, and empty corner of Litchfield County. A low-key location at the time, in ten years it would be overrun by celebrities and famous newsmen. Jenny had lived there on and off throughout her childhood, and her grandparents Bill and Buela had a house there where we all stayed when we visited. An old, low-ceilinged house built into a hillside in the 1700s, it was crammed with large antiques and dusty brocade sofas. I usually slept on the top one of the three floors. If I wasn't lucky enough to snag a room, a bed on the landing was usually empty, wedged Hobbit-like under the stairs to the attic. The house was surrounded by Buela's gorgeous rambling garden. She was especially proud of her lilac bushes, which she liked to say were so tall and
beautiful because she made Bill piss on them from an upstairs window after parties.

The service would be at the white clapboard church in town, with the reception—a large dinner dance—held afterward in a nearby barn belonging to old family friends. Even though Jenny was a staunch feminist atheist, a church wedding went with the long white lace dress and picture hat she had chosen to wear. She'd spent months with Martha Stewart's newly published
Weddings
book under her arm—obsessing over flower arrangements and silverware patterns, fussing over every detail, determined to have a perfect day. It was as if, quite suddenly, she'd become a grown-up, taking on all the concerns that grown-ups in the movies had. I'd thought that none of these conventions were supposed to matter anymore, but suddenly, it seemed they did. And even though I was thrilled for her, I felt I was losing a race I hadn't even known I was running.

The guests—over two hundred of them—started pouring in. Pete arrived with his family, a swarm of Homers: his mom, brothers, sisters, respective girl and boy friends, uncles, aunts, and cousins. Jenny was to be walked down the aisle by both her parents, John and Phyllis, who were divorced but appeared to have an amicable relationship, which seemed modern and civilized to me, as well as completely unlike my mother's slash-and-burn style of breakup and divorce. The only place I could see my parents coming together was at a crime scene in which one of them, probably my dad, would be dead.

I was to be a bridesmaid, as Jenny had promised her best friend in fourth grade that they would be each other's maid of honor. Having lived my younger life moving around, leaving many chums behind, this kind of pledge and long-lived friendship seemed inconceivable—even alien—to me. Friends, to me, were the people who were there for you in the moment, so I was a bit hurt by this interloper from Jenny's past. I decided to approach
bridesmaid
as a role; I wasn't the lead, or the “best friend,” but at least I was in the chorus.

The morning of the wedding, the bridesmaids all dressed in an upstairs bedroom at Buela's house. I had bought a pair of grayish-cream-colored pumps to wear, as instructed by Jenny, and had worried that they weren't the right shade, but luckily I passed inspection. I pulled on my tea-length, long-sleeved, minty-green-and-pink floral Laura Ashley number. Checking myself out in the mirror on the door, I thought I looked a bit like a chintz-covered armchair and wondered whether—if I stuck around after the wedding was over—I could live there at Buela's, pretending to be an ottoman.

We arrived at the church all together; it was a hellishly hot day, and as I was almost completely covered in fabric, I began to broil. Standing outside the church before the walk down the aisle and feeling faint from the heat, I had to sit down on the church steps with my head between my legs. Somebody brought me a lukewarm Sprite to sip on, and I started to feel good and sorry for myself. I wasn't getting married, I didn't have a boyfriend, and I had unceremoniously been dumped by the man I'd believed to be “the one.”
Jenny's wedding was all about me, the single bridesmaid, right?

This was only the second wedding I'd ever been to, the first being my mother's marriage to Pop in the Dakota when I was seven. I had coughed all through that ceremony, which ended up being a bad omen, since the marriage only lasted eighteen months. I didn't cough this time, but I did tear up listening to Jenny and Pete take their vows. Amazing, I thought, that these two people, whom I loved so much, had found each other and wanted to be together forever. How could they be so sure? Would I ever meet a guy I didn't have doubts over? I was twenty-seven—where was my Pete?

The rings on, Jenny and Pete kissed, and they turned to greet us for the first time as a married couple. We all clapped and cheered as organ music swelled, and we followed them up the aisle and out of the church. Looking at the backs of their heads, as they squeezed hands, smiled, and whispered to each other, I felt a curious mixture of both joyous euphoria and a pain like having an arm cut off at the elbow. My best friend was moving on, and I was happy for her and happy to see them so happy, but I also felt I was losing them and was lost myself.

I decided to handle my mixed feelings as maturely as possible and drink heavily at the reception. Luckily, two different men obliged by chatting me up—one of them I knew from visits to Cornwall. His parents owned the barn and the old farmhouse across from it in addition to a palatial penthouse apartment on the Upper West Side I'd visited a few
times. It was the kind of flat where the elevator opened into the foyer, and the buttery-wood floors led to a terrace that ran along the entire side of the apartment. The other potential suitor was the older brother of a girl I'd gone to Town School with in New York in the late sixties; I'd gone to his sister's eighth birthday party in their cavernous apartment on York Avenue, where they screened a sixteen-millimeter print of
A Dog of Flanders
and we played musical chairs and pin the tail on the donkey.

Both nice-looking, smart, and from privileged families, they were your basic preppy-prince types. I decided to send them both to the bar to get me a drink. The first one back got me. I would have denied it had anyone pointed it out, but I was behaving exactly like my mother, who always played multiple boyfriends against each other. Of course Mother was an expert, exacting trips, jewelry, and cars from her champions. At Jenny's reception, I was just a drunk amateur feeling sorry for myself. The brother of my childhood classmate never returned from the bar. I told myself that he was clearly frightened of my raw vagina power, but at the time he probably guessed at my little contest offering myself as the door prize. So the other one, Zander, the inheritor of all this prime real estate, won by forfeit.

We danced our asses off to the deejay until ten thirty, when it started to pour rain. We were bopping around to Springsteen's “Dancing in the Dark” when suddenly the electricity cut out, and we were all plunged into darkness. After some squeals of laughter, people lit candles, and someone
started singing “Amazing Grace.” Zander took my hand, and we ran into the dark garden on a slope below the barn. While we pushed our tongues into each other's mouth, I used the hand not around his neck to remove my panties and toss them into the bushes like a dueling glove. Laughing, we dashed to his house across the way, climbing the stairs up to an empty room in the attic with wall-to-wall carpeting and no furniture. We were both soaking wet and pretty hammered, but that just emboldened me to take charge and shag his brains out. Feeling Superwoman powerful from all the booze, I ripped his clothes off and threw him onto the floor. I was pretty sure by his reaction that no one had ever done that before. He'd never been with a bad girl like me. I got off on what a good time I was showing him; I was on top of Zander when a man walked in on us—a drunken, lost wedding guest—but I didn't care. I heard the soft mumbling of apology, and the door shut. I continued on my mission to burn this guy to a cinder with sex, to smote him.

“Oh my God,” he moaned. “You're amazing.”

Good,
I thought.
And, yes, I am
.

Afterward, he loaned me an L.L. Bean long-sleeved striped T-shirt and a pair of his sister's jeans, and we went to check out a party where Pete's family was crashing in another big, borrowed house down the road. There were wall-to-wall Homers, drinking Barrilito rum that someone had brought back from a Puerto Rican vacation, and the air was sweet with the smell of weed. We had a pop or two, then drove to a lake in an old, beat-up Volvo station wagon and
found another party going on in and around the boathouse. Plenty of people were skinny-dipping, but it was too cold and dark for me. I sat on the dock, hugging my legs, listening to the cicadas strumming along to the screams and shouts of delight coming from the water.

In the morning, at Zander's house, I changed back into my Laura Ashley dress, neatly folding the jeans and placing them on a chair in the corner. I thought about stealing the shirt—it was one of those French sailor tops that had been washed a hundred times until it was impossibly soft and perfectly worn. It was the kind of shirt your boyfriend lets you wear, like a love badge, I thought, as I moved my fingers along the ever-so-gently-frayed neckline. But Zander wasn't my boyfriend, and I left the shirt on top of the jeans.

I sneaked downstairs, hoping that anyone who saw me would think that I had just crashed in a bed someplace. A breakfast spread was laid out on the kitchen table—coffee, bagels, lox from Zabar's. Feeling as if rocks were exploding inside my head, I chugged a glass of orange juice and poured myself some coffee. Zander came into the room, looking nervous, and pulled me into a corner. Through the window over the sink, I could see his mom and dad with sundry guests on the porch.

“Hi,” I said, and took a sip of my coffee—any liquid crucial at that moment.

“Hi, listen, Wendy, I don't want you to get the wrong idea about last night.” He checked outside to make sure his folks were out of earshot.

“Oh, um, okay.” I wasn't sure what he meant. I was too busy trying not to appear monumentally hungover.

“It's just that I'm not looking for a girlfriend. I mean, I don't want to hurt your feelings or anything—I just want to be straight with you.”

“Sure, I get it.”

At first, I thought it was cute as hell of him to think I even wanted to be his girlfriend. Then I felt pissed—he was acting as if I wanted to marry him or something, after what was essentially a one-night stand.

“I'm not interested in a long-term relationship.” He nodded solemnly at me, as if I'd applied for the job and didn't get it. I hadn't been thinking about a relationship, either, but suddenly wondered,
W
hat is wrong with me?
Was it because I didn't have a WASPy-enough patina—my name wasn't Muffy or Soshie, and I didn't dress like those sweater girls in their clogs and turtlenecks? And here's the kicker: I'd thought I had had the power, that
I
was using
him
, but I was just a girl who drank too much and was good for a lay in an unfurnished attic. In seconds my power was gone, the victory vanquished by words, attitude, dismissal. The front I put up, the one that kept everyone from knowing about the crazy home life my sister and I had led with our mother for years, didn't protect me from anything. I wrestled with what I can only guess was the same kind of hurt and insult that drove my mother's fury—her dump-them-first, take-no-prisoners romantic philosophy.

“Well, I'm not, either, so you don't have to worry,” I said,
smiling a tad too brightly where Mother would have used an icy stare, and feeling humiliated, I walked out onto the porch to say good morning to everyone else.

•   •   •

Jenny and Pete left for their honeymoon, and I moved back into in my old room on Ninety-seventh Street, settling into the life of an unemployed actress with Jenny's brother Dave and his new girlfriend, Molly, as roomies. After having helped build the restaurant, Dave was now working insane hours as a sous chef at Bouley in Tribeca and seemed to never be home. Molly worked days at an advertising firm. Since they hardly saw one another, they wrote to each other about their days in a journal that was usually on the long dining-room table. Sweet, yes, but yet another example of two people navigating the difficulties of an adult relationship while I watched from the audience.

As I attempted to launch my acting career, auditioning, and looking for some kind of a gig to pay my rent and bills, Didi became my savior. In addition to being my agent and opening many doors for me professionally, she also fed me dinner a few times a week at her apartment and hired me to temp at her office or to babysit. Her daughter, a happy and magical four-year-old named Ali, reminded me of a little fairy you'd find in a garden. Didi's looking out for me made a big difference in my life, after years of what seemed like my drifting around. It was like climbing into a familial life raft in the wreckage of our parents' multiple marriages, divorces,
and the flotsam of ex-step-, step-, and half siblings strewn across the city and the country.

Didi got me an interview for a day job waitressing in an executive dining room at Teachers Insurance Company on Third Avenue in Midtown. The boss was her soon-to-be-second ex-husband's girlfriend—a descriptive phrase that few people outside of Didi's and my families could appreciate. The girlfriend hired me pretty much on sight and gave me a uniform to wear—a shiny, polyester black dress with a white Peter Pan collar and an attached white apron, like a chambermaid in a French farce.

The dining room was a perfect gig for an actress because it was over by two in the afternoon, so I was free to go to auditions after work. I was the youngest person there by far. The other waitresses were all lifers, all in their late sixties—the kind of world-weary broads played by Thelma Ritter or Selma Diamond who seem to be gone from the city now. The second-youngest person was Mo, who was around forty and had been an actor in 1970s, downtown–New York experimental theater. He'd worked at La MaMa, knew Janis Joplin, and once threw Allen Ginsberg out of the house for hitting on his friends at a party.