Flavor of the Month

by Olivia Goldsmith

  And it wasn’t as if Grandma had been grateful. She never was. Instead, she alternately coughed up phlegm and carped. “You’ve gained weight, I think. Look at me, skin and bone, but you, you’ve always been fleshy. On my food, on my pension, on my food stamps and Social Security, you got fleshy. Fleshy and conceited. Thought you were better than other people. Scuderstown not good enough for you. Nursing not good enough for you. Couldn’t be a practical nurse. Had to get that useless R.N., then you don’t even use it. Miss Actress. Got any jobs lately? Haven’t seen you on TV or nothing. What happened to that show you was in?” It went on and on, unbearably, ceasing only when enough bourbon and Nyquil put her grandma out for the night. It had been almost more than Mary Jane could bear.

  I should be grateful for being healthy, she told herself. I should be grateful that I’m smart. Not everyone is. For some reason, she thought of a high school classmate, Margery Heimann, who hadn’t been able to name the capital of New York State, even though Scuderstown was only forty miles from Albany. That was dumb.

  But, then, Margery was one of the prettiest girls in Scuderstown Regional High, and Mary Jane could imagine and did what it might be like to have all the boys follow you with their eyes and fight to sit next to you on the school bus.

  That had always been part of Mary Jane’s problem, she figured: her imagination was too good. As a teenager she couldn’t just sit there in the back of the gym at the pep rallies like the other lumpy farm girls, who seemed contented as cows. Mary Jane watched the cheerleaders, Margery Heimann among them, and could imagine what it would feel like to cavort in front of the crowd in those cute little skirts, and she was sure she would like the feeling. She also imagined, even then, how Lady Macbeth felt as she walked into the dark bedroom to commit murder, how Anna Karenina felt when she heard the train coming, and how Alice Adams felt when everyone ignored her at the dance. Oh, yes, even back then she could imagine that easily.

  But that, she reminded herself wryly, didn’t take very much imagination, since everyone at school had ignored Mary Jane. She had walked through the halls, a clumping ghost as far as all the boys and the popular girls were concerned. She was plain. Big nose. Beetle brow. Thick, lank hair. Thin lips. She decided then that there would be no easy way for her, no helping hand.

  She’d have to do it herself. Boys wouldn’t help her, her grandma wouldn’t help her. She’d have to do it all herself.

  And she had. Nursing school, on scholarship, to get out of Scuderstown. And then acting classes, and the almost hopeless round of agents, auditions, day jobs, cattle calls, small parts, and rejections. It had taken so many, many years to prove herself, but at last she’d had a hit, been recognized, been accepted, been paid to do the work she loved. And she’d even been loved by a man who was both brilliant and handsome. Yet somehow it seemed she was losing it all, that it was turning to elephant shit.

  An icy wind blew down Broadway, forcing Mary Jane into a doorway, where she tried to get her breath and a moment’s rest. Standing there watching people catching cabs, she once again asked herself that question, the one she knew the answer to, the same answer every time she asked. What am I doing this for? Give it up, the voice inside her, her grandmother’s voice, said. You don’t even have bus fare, your boots are leaking, your coat is five years old and coming apart at the seams, and you’re walking through a snowstorm to get to your acting group, which doesn’t pay anything but demands fifty hours a week from you. You must be crazy.

  But she knew she wasn’t. She was doing what she had always wanted to do. As a kid back in Scuderstown, acting had saved her life. She was in all the school plays, always in the character parts—Regina in Little Foxes, Mrs. Webb in Our Town—and she’d been good. Hell, she’d been better than good. She’d been real. It had showed her the real way out—out of Scuderstown and Elmira, out of her unbearable life. She knew her grandmother wouldn’t pay for college or acting school, and she had no money, and no way of earning a living. She had been forced into nursing school, but she had hated it. It was acting she loved, had always loved. It was in acting that she lost herself, found friends, gained herself. But now, once again, she would be forced to nurse just to earn some money.

  There had been a time, not so long ago, when she thought that the day jobs were finally over, that at last she’d be able to earn a living acting. She’d been cast in a little two-character play, Jack and Jill and Compromise. She played a dumpy, middle-aged loser sales clerk who does a one-night stand with a down-and-out salesman, and the two fall in love. It all took place with them naked, in bed, on an almost bare stage, and it had been what she had always dreamed of—the vehicle that moved her up into the modest success of a working actress. Then, wonder of wonders, it had been praised by the critics, it had moved to a big off-Broadway house, and for almost two years she’d played the role of Jill, the role she’d created. Best of all, it was sold to the movies, and one of the producers, Seymore LeVine, met with her, nearly promising her the role.

  She’d dreamed, back in Scuderstown, but she’d never been daring enough to dream of the movies. So, despite her very real success, her grandmother, Margery, and all the rest of Scuderstown was unaware of her triumph. They were not off-Broadway denizens, to say the least. But a movie. Everyone would see her. It would be a vindication, and, for the first time in her professional life, there would be some money in it. The play would bring her everything she’d ever wanted.

  Because it had also been the play that had brought her Sam. He’d written and directed Jack and Jill and Compromise. He’d cast her and directed her and—miracle of miracles—he’d fallen in love with her. Then, almost six months ago, when Hollywood bought it, he’d negotiated to get to direct the movie. And he’d told her that she’d get to do Jill on the screen. It was a gritty, real, everyday tragic part. And it would be hers. Forever.

  Sam had flown out to L.A. for the negotiations. He called her every night at first, then every other. Then, for almost a week, she didn’t hear from him. She’d been nuts. At last, she got his note, “Forgive me. I did the best I could. I’ll be back in four days.”

  Two days later, she read in Variety that Crystal Plenum was considering playing Jill. Mary Jane hadn’t been able to get out of bed for twenty-four hours.

  It was only her friend Neil Morelli who had gotten her through it. “They’re assholes,” he told her, while she lay, face down, silently weeping. “Listen, you remember what the Taoists say about this?”

  “No. What?” she sniffled.

  “Shit happens.”

  She sat up, wiped her nose. “Yeah,” she agreed. “And Hindus say, ‘This shit has happened before.’”

  Neil smiled, his weasel face almost looking good. “Here, eat some of my rigatoni in pesto sauce. Crystal Plenum is a bimbo. She’ll flop. Listen, you made Jill. You brought her to life. No one who ever saw you will forget that.”

  “Yeah. And no one will ever see me again.” The sadness overwhelmed her, and she turned away to cry.

  “Hey. You’ll get another part. Remember what the critics said? ‘Evanescent. Pathos without a scintilla of sentimentality.’ Even fuckin’ John Simon said you were transcendent, and he hates everyone. Fuck Hollywood. Fuck Sam. Fuck ’em all. Hey, while you’re at it, how about fucking me?”

  “Oh, Neil.”

  “All right. Maybe later, after you’ve wiped your nose again.” He handed her a fresh Kleenex. “So, how about a blow job?” he asked as she took the tissue. She grimaced at him and blew her nose.

  “There’s a good girl. Still, the next time you do a blow job, I’ve got a little hint: don’t use your nose, use your mouth, and don’t blow, suck. Got it? It’s guaranteed to improve your popularity. Might even get you a part.”

  Neil, her best friend, held her when she cried, made her laugh, fed her pasta. He was a great friend, but he’d been wrong. She hadn’t gotten cast in anything since Jack and Jill and Compromise. Sam returned, shamefaced and guilty, and she tried to accept and understan
d. Of course he had no choice. Of course Hollywood wanted to cast the hottest woman in town. Crystal Plenum, in the part. And when Crystal Plenum accepted the role, Mary Jane tried not to resent Sam for rejoicing. For the last six months, she had tried to forgive him, while she watched his career surge forward. She had to forgive him, or she’d lose him. She loved him, and she knew he’d done the best he could. Hollywood simply didn’t want fat, plain, almost middle-aged women on the screen. As far as she could figure, America didn’t want them anywhere. Mary Jane shivered and pulled her old coat around her.

  Sam had tried to make it up to her as best he could. He minimized the importance of the Hollywood trips for casting and preproduction prep, and he even began a new production—an off-Broadway revue that she’d be featured in. But he resented her depression.

  She shivered again. The wind was getting colder. At Times Square, she walked west through the theater district. Ugly, tawdry, with old handbills peeling from older brick walls, dark, urine-reeking alleys—but the part of town she loved. It was Wednesday, matinee day, she realized as she noted all the late-afternoon activity under the theater marquees, the comely crowd preparing to face the storm and wend their ways home to Westchester and Long Island. Mary Jane looked up at the enormous sign over the Plymouth Theater announcing Dead Stop. She had auditioned for it. No dice. Now she thought with envy of all the happily employed actors sitting in the warmth of an after-show glow in their cozy dressing rooms.

  Since Jack and Jill had closed, she had felt lost. And now she was afraid she might be losing Sam as well. He was all taken up with the movie, while she sank deeper and deeper into her misery. She watched him prepare for his trips to the coast, and she hated herself as she clung to him before he left and when he returned, as he would tonight.

  Sam hated clinging. It was probably why he was meeting her at the rehearsal. A cling-reduction strategy. It would be the first rehearsal with Sam in weeks. He’d run the group for nearly four years. And with him out on the coast, they all felt lost. But he’d be back now, for a while, and she’d pull herself together. She’d pull herself together and not resent that he would soon be leaving her for months, and try not to feel that he was leaving her for good. He’d asked her to come, she reminded herself. Maybe I shouldn’t have refused. The snow was turning to sleet. At least there would be no sleet out in L.A. No sleet and no work, she told herself.

  At last, drenched, she crossed Eighth Avenue, passed the two black whores who stood shivering in a Burger King doorway, and came to the entrance of the parish house of the St. Malachy’s Church. She pushed her way through the heavy wooden doors. Father Damien, the actors’ priest, stood inside talking with a parishioner and turned a startled face to her.

  “Mary Jane, you’re soaking wet.” The white-haired old man reached around her and helped her remove the snow-laden coat. He is always at hand to help an actor, she thought gratefully, and was moved by his concern. “What happened?”

  “Father, don’t ask. I’m an unemployed New York actress, and you’re my guardian angel. That’s all I know.” Holding her wet, torn boots by the edges and throwing her old coat over her arm, she bumped open the door to the stairs with her wide behind and said, “They better have some hot coffee ready down there, Father, or there’ll be blood on the walls.”

  2

  Sam Shields unfolded his sweater and threw it down on the bed. His trip back from L.A. should have tired him out, but he felt full of energy. And flying MGM Grand was a nice way to travel: nothing but first-class seats, and no one but first-class people. The studio had picked up the tab, and sent him to the airport in a Rolls limo. That was the purest luxury—going top-drawer OPM—on other people’s money. No more steerage for Sam Shields.

  It was about time, too. Money—other people’s or his own—was never a commodity Sam had much access to. Growing up on the North Shore of Long Island, in a tiny rented house that was always so damp that the wallpaper scrolled off the walls, where there was never enough money for proper clothes or a good cut of meat (but where there was always a bottle of Beefeater being poured by either his mother or his father), Sam had learned both what quality was and also how to do without it. Nice people wore Brooks Brothers, not suits from Robert Hall, so, if there wasn’t money for a quality new blue blazer, he wore the old one until his arms had pushed so far below the sleeves that it looked as if he had rolled them up. His father, a failing advertising man, had once been a golden boy at Doyle Dane, back when that was the place for a clever Yalie to be. His mother had done her two years at Smith and then donned white gloves at Katie Gibbs. Both lanky and good-looking, he fair, she dark, they met at the office and married a month later.

  What had it been like for them back in the fifties, when women wore hats and gloves, everyone drank Manhattans, and the city was a glistening pearl? Did they feel then the way he felt now, as if the world were opening up for him? He wondered if they had ever had a chance at the brass ring, and if they knew when, the exact moment, they missed it. Because for the two of them, after the first heady days of wine and roses, it was steerage all the way. Copywriting was beneath Philip, but what could he do that wasn’t? He talked about writing, but he never did it, and his wife never stopped resenting that. After a lot of time and a lot of booze, Phil couldn’t even write copy anymore. And Sam’s mother, that deb with a heart of steel, must have realized that, despite her husband’s pedigree and pretensions, she’d bet on the wrong horse. Sam’s parents reminded him of characters from a failed Fitzgerald novel: those who lived at the edge of the beautiful social world but never got to the center. Nowhere near it. And it was cold at the edge.

  Sam hated Fitzgerald novels.

  His parents had taught him to feel superior to everyone to whom he didn’t feel inferior; to look down on Jews, on Italians, and especially on the Irish. Blacks weren’t even in the picture. He was taught to revere the Whitneys (his father’s distant relations), the Harrimans, the Vanderbilts, the Roosevelts, and all their cousins, aunts, in-laws, and dependents. And, as if he were the monied scion of a great family, he was sent to Deerfield and Yale (both on scholarship), his father’s alma maters. Then he, too, had toiled in obscurity, with the fear that he would fail as his father had failed.

  Now that had all changed. He smiled as he reached into the suitcase and lifted out his crumpled jacket. It was an old black linen one—he always wore black—and much too summery for New York in winter. But it had worked in L.A. Everything had worked in L.A. He and April had clicked, the rewrites were coming along nicely, and it looked as if they might go into production as early as May. If they were lucky with casting, it could happen.

  Ah, casting. There was the rub. Jack and Jill was a gritty play, a slice of life. He’d seen it as film noir. Well, he still did. Not that it didn’t have humor, pathos, the whole nine yards. But it was a dark story. A true story. And aren’t all true stories dark?

  Well, his was. Long Island boy moves to big city, starves, lives for the theater, writes good plays, is ignored, almost gives up, writes one more, makes good. Sam shrugged, tired of unpacking, and dumped the rest of his dirty clothes onto a heap in the corner. Normally he’d leave the laundry at Mary Jane’s. But not as things stood right now.

  For the last two years, they’d lived together at her place most of the time, but Sam had been careful to keep his loft on East Nineteenth Street. It was important to him to have his own space to retreat to, and just as important for Mary Jane to know. It kept their boundaries clear. They were lovers, but he’d never made it a secret that he kept his options open.

  He went to the other side of the loft and hit the flashing button of his answering machine. It whirred, then beeped, then clicked, and then Mary Jane’s voice filled the room. “Not back yet? I hope your flight was okay. I’ve got to go down to Unemployment. In this weather! Call when you get in. I leave at eleven-thirty.” The machine beeped. Sam looked at his watch. Twelve-forty-five. He’d missed her. Just as well. He shook his head. She sounded fine,
but still made him uncomfortable. Guilty.

  Because there was the dark side. And it was Mary Jane. Not that she was some femme fatale. Sam had to smile. Oh, he’d had more than his share of those: neurotic, haunted, narcissistic actresses who tortured him. He’d married Shayna when he was only twenty-three and let her torture him for four years. Then he’d been a wild man, but after a year or so of the bar scene he’d found Nora, to drive him equally crazy. Who was more beautiful, Shayna or Nora? Who was more selfish? Impossible to call. After Nora there’d been a string of lithe, perfect women, all with dancer’s bodies, wonderful breasts, lovely lips, and tender, lying eyes. They’d either bored him or driven him crazy. Those were the two modes he’d known.

  Until Mary Jane. At thirty-six, he’d just been beginning to think that he might be a failure, and his last play expressed that. He was Jack: desperate and afraid. Afraid of another soured affair, afraid of another big break that went nowhere, afraid that if this play went down the toilet he wouldn’t have another in him. And in walked Mary Jane. Talented. Oh, more than talented. She took the part; hell, she fuckin’ owned the part of Jill. She made it live. Onstage, he couldn’t take his eyes off her. Working with her was so exciting. There wasn’t a nuance that escaped her. And she knew her craft. She could hit the emotional peak, then nail a gag with perfect timing, night after night. She always made it look new, fresh.

  Offstage, of course, she was nothing to look at. He had never taken her down to meet his judgmental parents. He imagined the mother’s eyes giving Mary Jane the once-over. Half Irish, half Jewish, and the worst of each. Sam could imagine his mother’s grimace, followed by the tight smile that would never reach her eyes. Mary Jane would not pass muster.