“What’s happening to you, to all of you?” he says. “What happened to the energy you had in Moscow? Come, come.”
The actors emerge from the shadows. Their eyes are ringed with makeup or sleep. They carry their buckets and, I see now, are in dress-up mode. They have scavenged various bits of costume, a headdress, a boa, a suede vest. Paul, in lederhosen and black glasses, his sling set aside for the scene, occasionally winces from pain.
Davos steps into the light. “You fuck around constantly. You are unserious. We try it again. Nadine, tiptoes. The entire time. Boys, you switch buckets. Back and forth. Good. Back and forth. Everyone?”
The boys in their dress-ups flex and release.
“Do not think about what your face is doing,” says the director. “It is cold. You are freezing and have no food, but you are in ecstasy. An ecstasy of starvation. But control! Do not pretend! Be!”
Nadine tiptoes. The boys starve and swing. They hang between preview and opening night. Paul says they sometimes nail it at the last minute, find the magic the exact moment the first audience files in. Paul says, they still haven’t found the missing set piece; it is a black stone archway that marks the transition point between the troll kingdom and the village and without it the play goes incoherent. They are superstitious. None of them believes they can fix the play, recapture the Siberian magic, unless they find the stone gate. Paul watches the pretty boy whom he replaced stump around woodenly. Nadine flirts with the blond, with Paul, with the director. Everybody’s faking it.
Paul says, “We’re interested in real, not in realism. We don’t want to make a copy. The theatrical experience is itself a real experience.”
“No,” Davos tells them. “Erase. Erase whole scene.”
When they break for dinner, I prepare to slip off. I have a paper to turn in; my internship is filming uptown and the AD’s just paged me. Besides, the experience of watching the play isn’t mostly pleasant. The experience of being near Paul, the same. It is not easy. It is like an ecstasy of starvation.
The brothers who run the studio where I intern make documentaries, but before they shoot in a house or a subway station, they like to enact small, fussy changes. Tear at a billboard poster, get one of the PAs to write graffiti. Move the clock from the mantelpiece. I can always tell what they’ve altered. This is my gift, and the higher I am, the sharper I become. Though, even though I haven’t eaten cloud in almost a week, when I look at Paul’s play, everything seems like it’s been staged after the fact, like it’s been grafted on.
“What do you think?” asks Paul, as I kiss him goodbye.
“Extraordinary,” I tell him. In my head, to pass my own lie detector test, I separate out the syllables. Extra. Ordinary.
I make my face do regular as I turn onto St. Mark’s Place. I think about what tattoo I would get, a pair of lips stitched closed, an organ bound in black twine, a full-body image of Paul on my skin. Hello, New York. I pass the towering queens with their lady ankles and their football shoulders, the septum punks decked in needle punctures. New York, I have a secret. My secret is a word that I can’t say. New York, I’m done with myself. So what if he hates me? So what? Even if I repel him, disgust him, I would still slide over in my bed at night, just out of hope. I will still come sniffing around his feet, begging like a starved coyote. No matter what, no matter what, no matter what. I keep the conversation going in the rhythm of the train’s motion, all the way uptown. Obviously, New York has heard this all before. To New York, I’m just another boring version of the same story. New York, it’s true, isn’t sorry for me, but still, New York understands.
It is early evening; I cross campus and duck into Schemerhorn. Beyond the propped classroom doors, students scrawl in blue books with sharpened pencils. I’ve got mostly papers this spring, and I’m writing them badly and late. In high school, I never knew how to get a C, but in college I’ve learned how little it takes. Turn something in, anything, and these Ivy professors will pass you. Lately, however, even that small effort has become difficult. Witness, the manuscript in my hand, speckled with Wite-Out, the footnotes written in blue pen during Paul’s rehearsal. I try to slip it under the lit office door, but it sticks, and when I apply a little pressure the door swings open and there’s Professor Mackin. She looks up from her grading and frowns.
“What do you have there?”
“It’s my paper.”
“What paper?”
“The one on Soviet-era immigration.”
She is a very attractive bottle redhead in her early forties. She wears leather miniskirts to class to show off her terrific legs and has a husband not handsome enough for her. She is meant to be a genius, academically famous, attributes we repeat but do not understand. Plus, she writes about sexy things, bondage and communism, leather and authority. Two months ago, on the strength of a previous class performance, and a paper I’d stayed up three days to write, she offered to mentor me through the application for a Marshall Scholarship. I remember the feeling, when she said it. Of course, I hadn’t heard of the Marshall scholarship, but it had the ring of White School things, of those kind of Longwood Tower old money secrets to which I’d always had only slanting access. It was February, sunny but with snow, when I left her office. Everything had a beautiful, thin light. I thought of all the things I could do next, all the knuckling down and cleaning up, and then I ate some cloud in the bathroom of the dining commons. Now, the deadline has come and gone, along with several others.
“Listen,” I say.
Mackin holds up a hand. “Save it.”
“No,” I say, “but listen.”
Mackin sets down the stack of paper in her hands. Gestures a chair. She is pretty, but I see in her face that forty isn’t young, that it might be hard to have an unhandsome husband and a stack of late papers and still wear a leather skirt to class.
“You hear ever of the New School of the University of South Florida? That’s where I went to college. Early seventies. Everyone was listening to progressive rock, and dropping a lot of acid.” She traces a hairline scar on her cheek. “One night, tripping my brains out, I walked through a plate glass window. A hundred and seventy stitches, skin grafts, ten months of surgeries. What I think about now, is all the time that led up to that night. Freshman year, sophomore year. Why is no one concerned? My parents are happy. My professors. My friends. Everyone is thrilled, because I’m delivering the As. As long as I do the basics, no one calls me on anything. Right? No one is worried.”
I nod. I’m not dropping acid, I want to tell her.
“And afterward, what do you think? Maybe two people. Maybe two people, the whole time I’m walking around with surgical gauze on my face, ever told me I was fucking up something that mattered. So, listen, you don’t try to bullshit me.”
“No, Professor,” I say.
“Are you interested in getting clean? Do you want to fix your life?”
“It’s not drugs,” I say.
My professor, she holds an MBA from Harvard, and made—before she went to get her PhD in political science, before she was lecturing on Iron Curtain/Iron Maiden—five million dollars in a single day.
I tell her, “I’m in love with someone, but he doesn’t love me.”
The disdain on her face is naked, and I think of the light through the snow in winter, and I think, I deserve this.
“My point is, it’s a matter of conserving resources. I can’t care about all of you.” Her mouth becomes a flatline, neither disappointed nor cruel.
I hesitate. It seems like there must be a rule that I’m violating, like I might get sent to the principal’s office, but Mackin’s point, I see, is that help is a precious commodity which should be reserved for people who have nothing to start with; that for people like me, all my wasted advantages, Mackin believes we earn the outcomes of our own bad decisions.
“It’s ten points off for each day late and another five for being sloppy. Shall we call it a flat C and save ourselves both some time?”
Mackin nods and returns her eyes to her stack of tidier, worthier essays. “Sure,” she says.
Walking through the twilight to my internship, I recall a dream. The phone is ringing and ringing; someone is pounding angrily on my door. Sir, says a voice like that of my RA. Sir, you can’t be in here. Sir, I’m going to have to call the authorities. The phone continues to ring.
I write it down in my paperback, something tracking me. There’s no need for a psychotherapist to locate the thing I sense at my heels, to name the entity that is knocking at my door. Since I have stopped eating cloud, I have not slept well. Three days from now, my contract with the dorm ends and I will be kicked out. My summer plan of living rent-free with Mr. Boyfriend is no longer possible. I’ve skipped two shifts in a row at work. I pull a tab off a sublet sign as I make the twilit walk to the film studio on 125th. The sense of being pursued is as palpable as footsteps even when I am awake. There is so much I’ve put aside, exam schedules crumpled, summer plans undone. I don’t ask what’s tailing me, but which, which of the many things that might want me is following in this moment, today.
Five
New York City
1993
The production company I intern with also rents out equipment to student films and commercial productions, and they have me dropping some lighting gear in Murray Hill before I’m due on set at 125th. I have a couple hours’ dead time. It’s a beautiful late afternoon, but I’m jumpy, cloud-hungry, and so I decide to walk the eighty blocks. It’s a day when I need to walk eighty blocks. Thirty-Fourth and First Avenue, bad shoes on my feet, I head uptown.
The director, this sculptor Westie, is shooting the production out of her studio. She’s not a film person, but she did this one arty short about two kids and a hanging, and the brothers who head my studio are obsessed. They are enormously nervous people to begin with, the brothers, the kinds who call you in the middle of the night to change the number of sesame bagels or rethink the gels on the lights. On top of this you have Westie, whose process, the Assistant Director tells me, is very improvisational, very informal. The collaboration has not been easy. Each hour of production time costs, and the brothers never have an adequate budget. I call the AD from a pay phone to let him log the delivery, and he tells me that it’s chaos uptown. They haven’t cast the supporting role, and suddenly Westie has been called home to Boston, aunt in the hospital, something. Now, says the AD, you have both brothers running around the set like mad leprechauns, throwing blame like confetti.
He likes to talk, the assistant director. “It’s a nuclear meltdown, here. Westie is against casting. Her idea is that actors should magically I guess intersect roles.”
We’re friends, kinda, me and the AD. He might have a crush. Any case, Westie hadn’t wanted to hire a casting director and now in her absence, the brothers can’t agree on a choice.
“I should go,” I tell him.
I pick up a voicemail from Nancy.
“So, yeah. We’re both out of there. Which is good. Is absolutely a good thing, even with who got us gone. I’m waiting, now, to make sure Andi gets on that train,” says Nancy. “I’ll breathe easier when she’s on the train.”
She is calling from somewhere public and busy. There’s a PA system in the background, barking announcements. Smoking is permitted only in designated outdoor smoking areas.
Meanwhile, Paul has been having his own dialogue with her. From him, I know that Andi’s escape had been facilitated by the bad boyfriend. Months ago, when she’d left Boston initially, it had been to get away from him. It was too sick, with him, too old and twisted. If she was ever going to be well, it had to be on her own. She’d made him swear he wouldn’t follow her. But on the farm, Andi had not gotten well. She wasn’t OK. And now the new kind of stuck felt worse than what she’d left behind. So, she’d snuck out in the middle of the night, shoeless, wearing only a nightgown. From a payphone two miles from the retreat center, she’d called. Would he come for her, she asked on the phone. Would he please?
Now, as Nancy speaks the final lines of the message, I can hear her shaking her head.
“It’s one of those things, like how it would be to be God. You can’t just make decisions for someone else. It’s like trying to design a leaf. Like trying to invent photosynthesis if all you have is a molecule.”
It is dusk when I reach the park. I pass women joggers with mace in their waistbands, and men, spaced out to their headsets. Am I scared, alone sometimes on the streets of New York? Am I scared when it is dark? Do I sometimes walk faster or glance behind me or cross the street? I do, but that’s not the whole story. There’s something you earn, by taking the risk, by walking anyway. And I haven’t been mugged yet.
Uptown, student territory, and then the empty blocks between the college and 125th. Westie’s studio is in an old industrial building, high ceilings, no AC, which is honestly better digs than usual. The brothers’ production company never has even half the budget to do what we need, is always stealing from its commercial division to support its experimental and documentary branches. I’ve met the accountant, doing a messenger run. He is thirty-one, completely bald, and has three ulcers, but for us, it is still a plum internship. This is why we’ll pick up the phone for a bagel order in the middle of the night or lug cameras from Harlem to Washington Square. We loan the production our subway passes, our parents’ apartments, our cats. We cook for the crafts services table in our dorm kitchens, we roll pennies, we plead parking tickets. Regularly, we are required to ditch classes, to spend twenty straight hours on set. The brothers are geniuses, have two Academy Awards, and have never spent more than fifty K on a production. It’s incredible to watch them work.
Tonight, the fat brother, Albert, is running auditions in the sawdust-strewn studio. This is the mnemonic we all use, fat Albert, thin Ansel. The brothers are twins and otherwise alike. The studio door isn’t a door. It’s like someone built the wall, and forgot about an entrance, and then just hacksawed into the drywall. The cut-out square is fixed on a set of brass hinges and hangs insecurely in the frame. The effect is as if some mad prisoner forced their way out—or in. The AD stops me at the entrance.
Ansel begins to shout. “Collaboration is emotional, fuckface.”
Albert is glowering darkly. An actor stands between them clutching the script. I’m surprised there’s a script. A script is kind of conventional for Albert and Ansel.
“I’m not reading lines,” says Ansel. “Get the girl to read lines.”
The AD is a decent fellow in that he’s the only crew member who doesn’t shit all over the PAs, doesn’t practice trickle-down exploitation on his subordinates. He tries to insulate the interns, or at least the me-intern, which returns to the crush possibility. Internships. My freshman year roommate was rich—not trust fund rich, but two-psychologist-parents-in-Connecticut rich—and she sort of got off on being abused by literary agents and MTV Productions. She felt like her suffering was buying her future success. She’d spend like eight solid hours comparison shopping padded bras for her employer, and then she’d take herself out for dinner at Bouley in consolation. Me, I think about the fact of having a job that costs me money constantly. Especially now that my boyfriend-revenue has been cut off, I do the bad math all the time.
But for the moment, I’m the girl. Beyond the AD, in the loft, a silence falls. Ansel and Albert beckon. The AD drops his arm and allows me to pass through. Things begin to spark for me as soon as I am inside. The feeling is of a bad recognition, is like opening a box of hurtful letters you thought you’d thrown away. I’ve never been in this room before.
“Mellie,” hisses the AD. “Mellie, go on.”
I keep walking, but the room, the studio, the stuff throbs at me. Floor to ceiling, the walls are lined with shelves, each shelf divided into irregular nooks, each nook stashed with some item. Many of the objects do not require explanation. A five-pound bag of flour, for instance, a teddy bear, a bent spoon:
fine. But interspersed with this ordinary inventory are elements of a collection which disturb. A jar of pink pickled egg with the words Rat Poison written in marker. An umbrella lined with human molars. No one else seems sensitive to it; no one else seems out of sorts.
OK? I go downtown. I have seen a man drive a nail through his penis. I can handle weird art, even if it’s not exactly my bag. The way this room sparks my heart rate is like the onset of cloud need. Is like the feeling of something I almost remember. I want to write, but there’s not time to write now, no room. There is in the organization into cubbies, a dark logic I understand.
“She the actress?” Albert asks.
“No, sir,” I say. I’m not being modest. I can’t act.
Ansel whispers something to Albert. Albert catches his upper lip in his teeth and considers me.
“Fine, whatever. Let her read.”
The actor, A, is hot. He’s tall and built and I remember thinking he was nice to look at on the big screen at the Angelica. B, he’s like what the fuck? Some nobody girl in giant glasses, with a sheen of grease in her T-zone, and I’m supposed to audition at that? Plus, the script isn’t a script. It’s more like a series of interview questions with the answers left blank. The actor is meant to improv, Ansel tells him. Is meant to answer in ways which are honest or at least honest-seeming.
He’s a pro, squares his shoulders, looks in my eyes like he’s not facing a piece of wood, and becomes something. “When were you last afraid?” I ask him. “Who do you find attractive? Are you yourself attractive?”
The Likely World Page 19