My Old Man

by Amy Sohn

  “I see you’ve made yourself comfortable,” Powell said, coming up next to me. I stood up and kissed him but he turned his face to the side and made it a cheek.

  “You’re here with this good-for-nothing prick?” Harvey said, standing up. Powell embraced him fondly and they held each other’s shoulders like Mafiosi. It’s not a good thing when your guy embraces another guy more warmly than you.

  I waited for Powell to introduce me but he didn’t so I said, “How do you guys know each other?”

  “I almost cast him in my first short, Death Comes Too Slow,” said Powell, “but I went with Ben Gazzara instead.”

  “And he’s been regretting it ever since!” Keitel said, and they both burst into an exaggerated round of overmasculine laughter.

  Jim Jarmusch hadn’t said anything, he was just lying with his hand over his forehead like he was sunning on a beach. “Is that Jimmy hiding under there?” Powell said. Jarmusch removed his arm and nodded slowly. “How you doin’, man?”

  Jarmusch yawned and strode out, his carriage long and erect. I wondered whether they had a rivalry going, because Jarmusch was so much more famous when Powell came up and now Powell was more prolific.

  “What’s with him?” Powell asked Harvey. “Bad mood?”

  “He’s in preproduction on a Noh version of The Bride of Frankenstein and his backers want him to cast Britney Spears,” Harvey said.

  “Sleeping with the devil won’t buy you a ticket out of hell,” Powell said.

  “You’re a wise man,” Harvey said, wagging his finger.

  I cleared my throat and gave Powell an imploring look. Why wasn’t he introducing me? I didn’t look like a model but I was cute and smart and he had asked me here. I felt like cracked and stale arm candy. “Oh,” Powell said. “Harvey, this is Rachel.”

  “You an actress?” Harvey said, shaking my hand.

  “Bartender,” I said. His eyes lingered on me for a second, as he seemed to weigh whether it was worth his time to ask a follow-up question, and he must have concluded it wasn’t because he turned to Powell, said, “Great seeing you,” clapped him on the back, and left.

  “That wasn’t very nice,” I said.

  “He’s got a lot of people to say hi to.” Powell’s look was even and mean and it made me want to walk right down the concrete stairs.

  “Are you OK?” I asked.

  “Not really. I dropped Nora off at her mother’s today and my ex-wife and I had a horrible fight. She wants me to take Nora for all of Christmas vacation so she can go to St. Vincent with her new boyfriend but I wanted to go visit friends in Rome. She’s a toxic individual and impossible to tolerate.”

  “Why can’t you split it up?”

  “I don’t want to talk about this.”

  I decided it was my job to cheer him up, to be as friendly and light as possible. “So where’s Schnabel?” I asked brightly. He led me into the outer room and pointed to a corner where the painter was holding court with a swanlike woman of ambiguous ethnicity. He looked like a happy Buddha. “You see that? Whenever he throws a party he stands there in that exact corner, and he doesn’t move.” As I watched I saw that Powell was right. As guest after guest made their way over to say hi, Schnabel stayed rooted to his spot, not budging an inch. They all had to come to him. Maybe this was how famous people got famous—by making everyone come to them.

  “You see?” Powell said. “It’s a work of genius, pure psychological genius. I’ve been working ten years on getting him to move but so far no luck.” He raised his hand in the air and said, “Julian!” Schnabel raised his glass like Powell was making a toast. “Happy New Year!” Schnabel smiled and nodded. Powell beckoned him over. Schnabel smiled again, pretended not to notice, and went back to talking to the woman. “You see?” Powell said, shaking his head. “The guy’s unbeatable.”

  Powell spotted a short guy in a suit across the room and said, “I gotta talk to that guy. He owes me money.” Then he ran off. I was beginning to feel like I should have stayed home. I went into a study off the main room and saw a small white cat making its way around the perimeter. It looked solitary but happy. An anorexic server came by with a plate of cucumber sandwiches and I grabbed one. As I was biting into it a throng of fame came in, flashbulbs going off wildly behind them: Harvey Weinstein, Chelsea Clinton, Nicole Kidman, Chloë Sevigny, and Robert De Niro.

  “Could I get a shot?” I heard the photographer say. Before I knew quite what was happening they were ramming themselves in a line next to me, turning their heads to their good sides. He raised his camera, and I waited for the light, but instead of taking a shot he lowered it. “Could you move a little?” he said to me, waving his arm. Harvey Weinstein, Chelsea Clinton, Nicole Kidman, Chloë Sevigny, and Robert De Niro all glared at me for holding them up and I skulked miserably out of the room.

  I found Powell deep in conversation with Willem Dafoe. Dafoe was wearing a gauzy halfway unbuttoned shirt and he looked as beautifully ugly as ever. I went over and put my arm around Powell’s neck protectively. “I’m Rachel Block,” I said, shaking Dafoe’s hand.

  “I’m Willem,” he said, as though it was necessary. He grinned through his messy teeth. I was certain his penis reached to his knee.

  “Willem’s been having some trouble with a female costar and I’ve been telling him she’s just envious of his talent,” Powell said, disentangling himself from me.

  “Who’s the actress?” I said.

  They stared at me like I had asked a totally verboten question. “Can’t say,” Dafoe said, “but she’s been taking cheap shots at me every day on the set so I’ve asked the king of women for advice.”

  “It seems obvious what you gotta do,” Powell said. “There’s something about you she can’t tolerate and you have to confront her so she stops being angry for the wrong reasons. Twenty years ago I had this dream. I was working as a short-order cook, living in a walk-up in Astoria that overlooked an air shaft…”

  Something strange happened as he continued. It became clear to me that Powell was more interested in having the floor than in communicating with any particular person. He was repeating what he’d told me on our date, word for word, with the same intonation, facial expression, and cadence, as though it was a pivotal monologue he was performing eight shows a week. The story mattered more to him than I did, or the reason he’d told it to me, and this enraged me because it made me feel irrelevant.

  Before I knew quite what I was doing I jumped in with, “Yeah yeah yeah. Women are sin, men want sin. Men are soul, women want soul.”

  Powell glared as though he wanted to incinerate me. “Thanks a lot,” he said.

  “What?” Dafoe said, not understanding. “I didn’t hear because you were talking at the same time. What was the dream?”

  “It doesn’t matter now,” Powell said, with a wave of his hand. I had done the single worst thing you could do to an attention-hog narcissist: stolen his punch line.

  “I’m sorry, Hank. I—I wasn’t thinking.”

  “You never do,” he spat.

  Dafoe looked from Powell to me, swallowed like he didn’t have the mental energy to be witness to a lovers’ quarrel, said, “Is that John Waters over there?” and dashed away.

  “I can’t believe you!” Powell said. “Does someone pay you to ruin things?”

  “No, I—I do it pro bono, actually,” I said.

  “I never should have invited you here.”

  “Maybe you shouldn’t have,” I said. The huge room felt tiny and airless. I was the lowest form of life on earth: a civilian. “I’m really sorry, Hank. I’m not usually in situations like this. I just got carried away. Plus I haven’t really eaten because I got kicked out of Rosh Hashanah dinner with my parents for being a bitch. It hasn’t been the greatest night.”

  He paused for a second, as though the jerk and the nice guy inside him were having a fight. I wasn’t sure why, but the nice guy must have won because he put his hand on my shoulder, sighed, and said, “Let
’s get outta here.”

  We took a cab to Raoul’s, on Prince Street, because Powell said he hadn’t been there in a while. The restaurant was dim and romantic and everyone there looked like they’d lived a long time and suffered.

  The hostess led us to a booth in the back. A waiter came over with a chalkboard that was all in French. Powell said he already knew what he wanted, the steak frites, and I said I’d get the same. I waited for him to order a bottle of wine but he said he just wanted a glass of Syrah so I said I’d have one too.

  “I didn’t mean to be rude at the party,” Powell said wearily, as though even apologizing was exhausting. “It’s been a rough day because of my ex-wife.”

  “That’s OK,” I said softly.

  “So what happened with your parents?”

  I told him about my ruined intervention, and the “Oh brother” moment, and how duplicitous and phony my dad been with my mom, and by the time I finished I was close to crying. “If I knew it was going to end soon it would be one thing,” I said, “but it doesn’t look like it. Liz is encouraging him to write the great American novel.”

  “It all makes sense,” he said, fingering his chin.

  “What does?”

  “The affair is your father’s attempt to resolve his anima problem.”

  “I thought it had to do with him being out of work.”

  “It’s both! This girl, the flip-flop, represents your father’s anima. She’s the symbol of his untapped creative potential. She’s the veiled figure in his dream. When she appeared to him in life he had to be with her, to work it out. And she’s got a very masculine jaw, which only makes it easier for him to see himself as her.”

  “Why does he need her to work it out?”

  “He thinks she’s him. He’s distraught, in need of validation. I was like this once with a woman.”

  “Who?”

  “I’m not naming names. I met her at a party. I was watching her listen to a man and I could tell she was bored by what he was saying. I eyed her from across the room and two seconds later we were out on the street. The first words she spoke were, ‘It’s a pleasure to meet me.’ She knew she was my projection. We were together for two years. We would walk around and she would see someone she knew and as they conversed I would feel that the person was talking to me. I felt I was she. Eventually she left me because she knew my love was all projection, and I realized I was only dating her because I thought she could solve a plot point in Act Two of Roberto Bites His Tongue.”

  “I never heard of that one,” I said.

  “That’s because it never got made. Once we broke up I was thrown into a frenzy over a different plot point in Act Three, one that I’m still trying to solve. The point is, it’s better to be alone than to date your own face.”

  “Aphorism Five?”

  He nodded solemnly. “Your father will stay with this girl until he can integrate his own anima. When he realizes she just represents a part of him, he’ll be able to move on.” I was beginning to wonder whether all his aphorisms were just different ways of saying, “Women suck.”

  The waiter brought the wineglasses and said he’d come back for our order. Powell took a sip but no pleasure in the taste. “Listen,” he said. “This might be the wrong time given your histrionic state but would it be all right if I read you something?”

  “Sure,” I said. “What?”

  “I got a pitch meeting tomorrow,” he said, taking some papers out of his bag, “and since I haven’t done one in a long time I was hoping I could do a dry run.”

  “Definitely! Who’s your meeting with?”

  “Joe Roth. Revolution Studios.”

  I was a former rabbinical student but like every New Yorker I read the business pages of The New York Times. “That’s amazing!” I said. “What’s the movie about?”

  “A guy who falls in love with his wife’s sister,” he said. It was an arena I might be able to assist with. He laid the papers out on the table. There were about ten of them but as I leaned over I saw that they were single-spaced. I prayed he wasn’t going to read the whole thing.

  “I’d like to read the whole thing to you,” he said. “It might take a little while but it’ll be good practice for me.” Though I hadn’t really thought about it before, Powell was at a crossroads in his career. He hadn’t made a movie in three years and I realized that he might be struggling, flailing, just like I was.

  “So did you pitch yourself for Flash Flood?” I asked.

  “Of course.”

  “What was your ‘take’ on that?”

  “Two hundred thousand dollars.” He put on his glasses and began to read. “The Brother-in-Law. Act One. Nick Clay, our hero, is standing face to face in an ornate church with his beautiful bride-to-be, Alessandra.”

  “Is she Italian?”

  “What?” He looked up from his pages, his glasses cockeyed on his nose.

  “I thought names are symbolic. That’s why Rose of Sharon is called Rose of Sharon in The Grapes of Wrath. She represents sexuality and life.”

  “I never subscribed to that particular school of dictatorship,” he said. “To me it’s arbitrary. I change half the names of my characters at the last minute. I like the name Alessandra because I was thinking about the limited amount of time I had to prepare this pitch and I pictured sand running through an hourglass. May I continue?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “The expression on Nick’s face is not one of joy but of terror. In fact, he is not even looking at Alessandra—”

  “Sorry,” I said, raising my hand like I was in school. “But if they want to go in a mainstream direction with this maybe you should pick a name that’s a little less ethnic. Hollywood’s very self-hating. That’s why Diane Lane got cast as a Jewish mother in—”

  “Don’t interrupt me,” he said. He regarded me as though I was a special-ed McDonald’s worker who had just screwed up his order.

  “I thought you wanted feedback,” I said.

  “When did I say that? I never said the word ‘feedback.’ I said I wanted practice.”

  “OK,” I said. “I’ll be quiet.” It was such a downer. I was on the verge of critiquing a living icon only to find out I had to stay Helen Keller.

  He cleared his throat again. “In fact, he is not even looking at Alessandra. He is looking up at the statue of Jesus on the wall above the altar and his expression mirrors that of the pained savior. As he stammers his way through the vows, he looks up at Jesus’ hands, bloody and nailed to the cross, and begins to weep. Alessandra mistakes his tears for tears of joy and embraces him as we pan up to the real Jesus, who now appears to be crying for real.”

  “Does it need to be that specific?” I said.

  He put down the papers. “What?”

  “I mean with the camera direction and all. Isn’t a treatment just supposed to give a general idea of the scenes more so than a shot-by-shot—”

  “You know what? Forget it,” he said, shoving the papers back in the folder.

  “No!” I said. “It’s OK! I can keep listening.”

  “I don’t think this is going to work.”

  “Come on! I really want to help you.”

  “I mean I don’t want to see you anymore.” My heart lurched to my throat and bounced up and down inside my mouth like a pink rubber ball.

  “Is this all because I gave you unwanted feedback?”

  “No. It’s because of a lotta things. I feel put-upon in general right now and you only put upon me more.”

  “But I don’t mean to.”

  “It doesn’t matter what a person means to do. It’s what he does. I saw it the second night we were together. You want things I can’t give you. I feel no ill will toward you but I can’t do this.”

  “You invited me out tonight!”

  “And I shouldn’t have,” he said gravely. “As I was on the phone with you I saw a black cat crossing the street. I had the instinct to hang up on you then but I fought it and I always get in t
rouble when I fight my own instinct.”

  “I think you’re making a big mistake,” I said.

  “I know you do but we want different things. I can’t have a relationship.”

  “But I don’t want a relationship!” I yelled.

  “You do,” he said. “You don’t want a criminal. You want a bourgeois boy, a Jew your own age.”

  “I don’t!” I said, fighting hard not to cry. “I’m not even going to synagogue tonight and it’s the second-holiest of the year!”

  “This isn’t a debate. If we keep at this it will lead to more pain for you, and I don’t want to cause anyone else pain. I need to conserve my energy.” He was the Keyspan of breakups. Dumping me as an environmental act.

  The waiter brought over our food and asked if I wanted ground pepper. I shook my head. Powell took out some twenties and laid them on the table, put his papers into his shoulder bag, and stood up. “I’m sorry to do this when things are so rough for you, but this is the right thing. I know it.”

  “What makes you so sure?”

  “I’ve lived longer.”

  I nodded numbly and watched his back as he walked out. If only I’d just stayed home and gone to bed, or even to shul. At least then I wouldn’t be single.

  Suddenly the door opened. He was coming back, walking just as briskly as before, with a look of enormous purpose. He had changed his mind, realized what an ass he’d been, realized he not only loved me but wanted to be with me forever.

  “I’m all turned around,” he said.

  I started to weep but I smiled through the tears and said, “I know you are.”

  “I don’t know the right subway to take. How do I get home?”

  My hope plummeted down to the floor of Raoul’s like a Slinky and toddled out onto Prince Street. “Oh,” I said. “Make a left on Sullivan till you get to Spring and then turn right till you get to the A. You can switch to the F at Jay.”

  “Thanks,” he said. He turned again and disappeared out the door. I took a sip of his wine and stared at the place where he’d been.

  WHEN I was thirteen I had to go to a junior youth-group party at a temple on the Upper West Side. I wasn’t allowed to ride the subway myself so my dad said he’d take me, but I was going through an overly self-conscious phase and when he offered I said, “I don’t want to show up with you! I don’t want anyone to see me with you because you don’t know how to dress.”