Heart of Glass (28 page)

That didn't mean I wanted to be ignored by them. Since I was running around in little dance tights and a sports bra during most of the play, I joined the YMCA and started doing leg lifts like crazy. Being practically naked in the show put the fear of God in me and my dimply thighs.

Jenny's due date approached; every time I called her house and she didn't answer, I worried that she was giving birth in her car or something. Her son Nathaniel came right on time, but sadly, three weeks later her dad succumbed to cancer. He had been in remission, but then the cancer suddenly and swiftly returned. I was happy he got to see his grandson and hold him, but everyone was devastated by his death. I took the train down on my day off and spent a sad afternoon at Ninety-seventh Street with Jenny and Dave. I wasn't able to go to the memorial service because I had two
shows and no understudy. I felt that I was letting them down by not being there, but the show had to go on.

The play was up and running and very physical—the fairies all flew in the production, and I thought that the moment when Bottom flies off with Titania into the night was one of the most beautiful things I'd ever seen. I also learned why Peter Pan is usually played by a woman: if a man wore those harnesses, he could end up with earmuffs made of his own testicles. The lovers ran around and jumped in and out of a large pool of water in the stage floor during the second act. Invariably, the first two rows of the audience got as soaked as if they were watching Shamu at SeaWorld. I had to wear knee pads to prevent carpet burns and accidentally pulled Demetrius's pants off completely one night groveling after him.

Lots of people—friends, roommates, ex-roommates, and family—came to Hartford to see the show. Didi came with her new fiancé, even though she wasn't divorced from her second husband yet. His name was Michael, and he was an actor, an ex-marine with red hair and a salty sense of humor who I thought was a good match for her. Michael appealed to the bawdy, bourbon-drinking broad in her as opposed to the WASPy boarding-school side. My sister, Robin, who had recently moved to New York, came for opening night and quickly developed a crush on my castmate Brad Whitford.

“He's so hot!” She giggled and fanned her hand in front of her face.

“His girlfriend just dumped him—want me to introduce you?” I batted my eyes at her, calling her bluff.

“No, thanks. I just like to look.”

My sister's track record with men was no better than mine. She had a penchant for difficult, withholding types and bad boys just as I did. So far, that hadn't worked out for either of us.

Being in
Midsummer
felt like the most rewarding experience of my short career; I learned so much from Mark and my fellow actors about pacing, endurance, and the pow-pow-pow of doing Shakespeare and turning on a dime. Performing the play was exhilarating, like running a race and winning every time. But when the play ended, I went back to the city and again took up my place in the registration line at unemployment. My high was over.

I was broke. I had sold my car for $1,000, and the money from my grandfather had run out despite my frugal living. I made ends meet temping for a few agencies for nominal pay, since I didn't know how to type. I worked as a reader at auditions. I got a one-week gig on a soap opera called
One Life to Live
, playing a debutante in a big dress, which paid the bills for a month and let me work with Celeste Holm, the Oscar-winning actress. I got to spend a week with her, laughing and listening to her stories about double-dating with JFK and his older brother, Joe, the one who was killed in World War II. She drove the wardrobe people crazy by taking home parts of her costumes, the Ferragamo shoes especially. “They're mine,” she'd declare indignantly. Perhaps
she was confusing ABC with RKO or some other movie studio from her glittering Hollywood past. Or perhaps she remembered just how quickly a run can end and where the unemployment line begins. Either way, she was gracious, hilarious, and very kind to me, even though I don't think she even knew my name.

No sooner had I paid up my rent and share of the bills than I had to move. Dave had a new girlfriend, and they were serious. With two jobs and a ridiculously low rent, they didn't need to sublet rooms anymore, and they wanted to be alone—to have a grown-up relationship in an apartment decorated with unbroken furniture and items brought inside on purpose. It was the end of almost a decade of roommates and boarders and of the apartment at Ninety-seventh Street serving as a crossroads or way station between school and real life. I understood, but the timing wasn't great, as I had $75 left in my bank account.

Maybe out of guilt for kicking me out or maybe just because he was a nice guy, Dave helped me get a job hostessing at Bouley. When David Bouley had left Montrachet to start his own restaurant, he had taken Dave and a couple of the other young stars of the kitchen with him. The new restaurant was a huge success and always overbooked; I took reservations over the phone during the day and seated people in the evening—an upgrade from the days of indecipherable sandwich orders. It was a crazy kind of glamorous, getting seriously dressed up every night, putting on heels and standing up to the Masters of the Universe as they foamed at the
mouth and threw their platinum cards at me to try to get a table for their supermodel girlfriends or Valentino-jacketed wives. Only in Manhattan can a girl just over five feet tall in borrowed designer clothes and getting paid eight bucks an hour in cash wield so much power. My first night on the job, the waiters took me out after closing to a dive bar a few blocks away called Puffy's to celebrate my survival. After a few too many drinks, I ended up singing on top of—and then drunkenly falling off of—the jukebox. The management asked us to leave, and the thrilled waiters hoisted me up in the air above their heads and carried me out to the street to put me in a taxi home. Apparently, I'd passed the test. The next morning I had a bruise the size of a basketball on my butt.

Just as Dave had helped me out with a job, Didi came to my rescue on the apartment front. Her fiancé, Michael, had a small, dark, dumpy bachelor pad on the interior of a building on Amsterdam Avenue in the Eighties that he wasn't quite ready to give up, so he kindly let me sublet. It was cheap and close to my old neighborhood; I didn't even have to change dry cleaners.

Despite the apartment and the job, I felt despondent and restless. I hadn't had a serious acting job in months and was anxious because my career seemed to be over. I was busy, dashing around the city to pick up scripts, clocking some hours at Bouley, spending a week answering an office phone on the East Side here and there. I continued my sessions with Elaine, who graciously allowed me to pay her when I
could. Didi sent me on many auditions—I was the callback queen, but callbacks aren't a job. Then at the end of March 1989, I went down to the Public Theater to try out for a production of Shakespeare's
Cymbeline
. The director, JoAnne Akalaitis, was an avant-garde theater legend who'd been one of the founding members of the experimental theater group Mabou Mines. She had flaming-red hair, cropped short and spiky, wore retro, thick-framed glasses and black pants and jackets like a punky teenager, and had a ghostly pallor that made her look as if she'd never been outside.

The leading-lady role in the play, a princess named Imogen, is the longest woman's speaking part in Shakespeare and quite difficult. After I read one of the speeches, I mumbled thanks and started gathering up my stuff.

“I feel like I've met you before.” JoAnne was chewing gum and turned my résumé over in her hand. “Is that possible?”

“I don't think so.” I shook my head. She was probably a year or two younger than my mother, but was nothing like her. JoAnne had a warm, maternal, matter-of-fact manner. I guessed she got along well with her kids.

“There's just something very familiar about you.” She smiled and asked me to come to the callback on Saturday.

The callback was more of a combat and movement class led by a fight choreographer. Afterward, JoAnne told me she wanted me to be in the play, but she laughed and said she didn't know what I would be doing in it yet. I said great, ecstatic for the chance to work with a director of note and at the Public Theater, too.

She cast me as a lady-in-waiting to Imogen, who was to be played by Joan Cusack. The bonus was that I would get paid a much-needed extra $20 a week to understudy her. I had one line—“The Queen, my lady, desires your highness's company.” My character didn't even have a name. But I didn't care, I was working. The company ran the gamut, from actors deeply rooted in the experimental theater, to classically trained ones from Juilliard and Yale, and included Don Cheadle, Wendell Pierce, Peter Francis James, Frederick Neumann, Joan MacIntosh, and Michael Cumpsty.

I could tell that a few of the actors didn't enjoy JoAnne's directing style, but it was so out there, I found it all fascinating. We did a big group warm-up, dancing onstage to African music before each rehearsal, then we'd lie on the floor as she'd read us Artaud. We did mudra exercises—a series of formalized hand and face gestures—and moved around the stage in slow motion. She didn't like doing table reads, so everybody was up on their feet the first day, running scenes. All the movement in the court scenes was stylized, to accentuate all the artifice and intrigue. JoAnne was well-known for having male nudity in her productions; the villain Iachimo's first scene was in the buff in a massive bathhouse, and the young men who lived in the forest, played by Don Cheadle and Jesse Borrego, wore practically nothing—leaping around the stage in loincloths. This might have explained why they were always being followed around by packs of teenage girls. I was so jazzed—me, in a show with hot and legendary actors at a world-famous theater? Even though I had a small part, I felt
as if I'd arrived. With so little time onstage, I often sat out in the house watching rehearsals and scribbling down Joan's blocking. JoAnne, who'd started out as an actress, treated everyone in the cast the same and was nurturing and direct; when she'd get mad at someone, or about something, she'd yell—and then it was over. She didn't hold grudges. I admired her style. I felt drawn to her in a mommish way. She seemed so strong, sure, and so much her own person.

One day at rehearsal, she introduced us to the show's composer: “Hey, everyone, this is Phil. He'll be doing the music.”

“Phil” turned out to be Philip Glass, arguably the most celebrated living modern composer as well as her ex-­husband. For the next few weeks, Phil hung out with us, watching rehearsals and scribbling in a notebook. I was agog, not just because he was famous but because he and JoAnne were divorced and yet working together and enjoying each other's company. Their ex-relationship was more successful than any of my relationship relationships.

Soon after rehearsals began, I started dating a man, Isaac, I had met at one of Didi's parties. A divorced Jewish lawyer with a four-year-old son, he was smart, funny, and nine years older than me. He was a little goofy looking, tall and wiry, with big round eyes and tightly coiled hair that he kept short. He wore expensive suits and had a spacious apartment on the Upper West Side and a beach house on Long Island. I would spend the night at his house but would always move to the guest bedroom early in the morning so
as not to confuse his little boy, Eli. Isaac's ex lived in the same building, a few floors below, and Eli moved back and forth between apartments. Having grown up with a ever-changing roster of my mother's boyfriends, I tried to be especially sensitive toward Eli, who was chattery and blond with huge blue eyes. I'd always hated it when some guy my mom was dating tried to muscle in and act as if he were my dad or offered to buy me stuff so I'd like him more. I sort of waited for Eli to come to me; I let him take the lead. And it worked.

“Wanna pway bawl?” He sniffed and ran his sleeve across his nose.

“Sure.” I resisted an impulse to grab him and kiss him to death, which would have scared him.

Soon, the maid was doing my laundry and leaving it neatly folded on top of the washing machine, and Isaac would bring me a cup of delicious coffee in a fine china cup on a tray in bed. I'd watch him get dressed for work, and he'd ask me if I needed anything. He knew I was always strapped for cash, so he never hesitated to pick up the check for fancy wine lunches at Café Luxembourg or late-night
steak-frites
at Florent, a greasy-spoon bistro in the Meatpacking District after the show.

“Do you have any money?” He knotted his luscious Italian silk tie expertly one morning before heading off to his law office.

“I have a couple of bucks.”

He rolled his eyes comically and took his wallet out of
his jacket breast pocket, pulling out a twenty. “Jesus, take this. I don't want you starving to death. The life of an actress!”

I took the money and thanked him. I didn't feel badly about it, because I knew he didn't care, and it was only twenty bucks. That didn't even qualify as Holly Golightly's $50 for the powder room. Let alone my mother's grand piano or washing machine.

During a long technical rehearsal, I was lying on a table backstage, getting in a little power nap, when JoAnne stopped in the hall next to me. I opened my eyes.

“I just realized where I know you from.” She was chewing gum and had her hands on her hips. “I babysat you when you were three or something.”

“Really? Wow.” I tried to imagine JoAnne in capri pants, little white socks, and Keds. I was having trouble.

“Yeah, it was summer stock in North Carolina—Chapel Hill. I played your dad's daughter in
A Man for All Seasons
, and I used to take you and your sister to the public swimming pool on the day off.” She grinned widely at me, clearly happy to have solved the mystery.

Then she asked me how my mother was. I said I didn't really know, that we were sort of estranged.