Almost Paradise

by Susan Isaacs

  “Yes, you can. You’re just reporting it.”

  “She said Randy Dale—you know, that pixie-looking little tap dancer who was in all those movie musicals—she said he has a…I just can’t say it.”

  “Just spit it out. Come on.”

  “She said he may be short but has a wang that goes from here to Cleveland. You should hear her, though.” Jane spoke in Carla’s rough, wise-guy voice. “‘What a wang!’ I never even heard the word before. At first I thought she said ‘wank,’ until she repeated it fifteen times.”

  “Want to feel my wang?” Nicholas asked.

  “No.”

  “That’s not what you’re supposed to say.”

  “How about your wank?”

  “My wank’s even better than—”

  “Shhh! This is a public street.”

  “I want to do it with you everyplace.”

  “Who put these apples here?” the star was screaming. “What kind of stupidity is this?”

  Nicholas’s stomach contracted into such a hard knot he wanted to sink to the floor to catch his breath. He had not felt so awful since he’d been caught drunk in prep school. He’d screwed up his first professional assignment. Not a big screw-up, he knew. It was only a rehearsal. Another actor might have ignored it. But not Ron Lipscomb.

  “What am I supposed to do?” Lipscomb’s fury swelled. “Stop at the height of dramatic tension and move apples?”

  Lipscomb could not memorize his lines. Some of the pages of the script were fastened to side flats and the backs of chairs for quick reference during the play; others were glued into the books he leafed through—he played a college professor. The ones in question were spread under the glass top of a coffee table in front of the couch where Lipscomb was seated. Nicholas, who’d been in charge of setting out props, had been called backstage and, without thinking, had placed a bowl of fruit in the middle of the table, not on its mark at the table’s edge, thus depriving Lipscomb of access to his character’s words.

  Lipscomb rose, marched upstage, and lifted his head like Lear defying the storm. “What is expected of me, I want to know? Am I to memorize every single line?” He tossed his head, allowing his dark, wavy hair to bounce to good advantage. “This is beyond endurance!” he cried.

  Nicholas looked up. Lipscomb’s hysterics were so out of proportion to the oversight which had motivated them that he thought everyone must—by now—be smiling. He almost felt better. Lipscomb was obviously staging a scene. His foot-stamping couldn’t be natural. His pronunciation was laughably theatrical; endurance was “endyoo-rance,” the second syllable drawn out far more than customary usage required. But when Nicholas saw the expressions of the other Guilderland apprentices and the No Body’s Home stage manager, the painful weight of apprehension pushed him down again. The apprentices appeared frightened by Lipscomb’s tirade and glanced at each other for comfort. But when their eyes met Nicholas’s, they looked away. The stage manager, who had been with the production since its inception, allowed a range of emotions to flash across his face: concern, disgust, weariness, and, finally, wariness. Not a single person was smiling.

  People took Lipscomb seriously. As host of the hit primetime quiz show Climb to the Top, he had garnered a reputation as an intellectual, tossing off questions about Xenophanes or the Fauvists with a grace that implied that, naturally, he knew the answers. He spoke as though it had been a toss-up whether to be a Cambridge don or a television personality.

  “Is this a theater?” he shouted. “Is it? Is it?” Looming above the collar of his white turtleneck, his large oval face was so flushed it resembled a lollipop. His fans would not have recognized him, for he was famous for his cool; even as a contestant reached Mount Seven, the seventy-thousand-dollar question, the most Ron Lipscomb would do was take off his glasses and wait for the answer a bit more intently than usual. “I want to see the idiot responsible for this debacle!”

  Nicholas did not move forward, not because of fear—although he was afraid—but because he was stunned. No one in his life had ever spoken like that. Certainly not to him. Grown men didn’t become hysterical because a bowl of fruit was a few inches from where it should be. Grown men said “Damn,” at worst, or moved the bowl. And grown men, married men like Nicholas, didn’t put up with that sort of nonsense. They went directly to whoever was out of control and said “Get a grip on yourself” and that was that. And just as he was about to stride out onto the stage and face Lipscomb, the stage manager whispered out of the corner of his mouth, “Apologize.” Nicholas shook his head almost imperceptibly. The man inched closer. “Apologize,” he insisted. “Come on. This is Ron Lipscomb, not some cruddy little New York actor. Who the hell do you think you are?” There were only the two of them now in the wings; the other apprentices had edged away, abandoning Nicholas.

  Nicholas took such a deep breath that the exhalation propelled him out onto the stage. “Sorry, Mr. Lipscomb,” he said.

  “You!” the star said. “It had to be you, didn’t it, Blondie? It wasn’t bad enough yesterday when you scratched half my luggage unloading it, was it? Was it? Do you have a voice? Do you hear me or are you deaf?”

  “I’m very sorry,” Nicholas managed to say. The apology was so difficult to get out his jaw ached with the effort.

  “I can’t hear you!”

  The worst part was that he knew it would all get back to Jane. Humiliation flooded him because he knew he had a choice, and he was choosing to be a coward. He almost wanted to cry, but he’d have no tears for someone like himself. Nicholas forced himself to lift his bowed head. He projected his voice the way he knew Ron Lipscomb expected him to, so everyone in the theater could hear him: “I’m sorry, Mr. Lipscomb.”

  “Did your mother ever tell you you were an idiot? Did she ever tell you you were a complete incompetent? Well? I can’t hear you.”

  “No.”

  “‘No, Mr. Lipscomb.’ Well, let me be the first to tell it to you, you stupid little fairy. You can’t do anything right. You couldn’t carry a suitcase up a flight of stairs. You probably couldn’t walk across the stage without falling flat on your face, and you’re just the kind who’ll try and sabotage anyone who can. I’m telling you you’re not going to do it with me. And I’m telling someone—Milo!” The stage manager raced out from the wings. “If I see this imbecile anywhere, Milo, onstage, offstage, or even strolling on the grounds, you’re going to have to find yourself a new Professor Brain-tree. Do I make myself understood? I am not going to begin a summer’s tour with an ulcer caused by some idiot faggot. Get him away. Now! And get me some tea with honey for my throat.”

  “Where are you going?” Carla Brandon grabbed Nicholas by the shoulder of his shirt and dragged him into the publicity office. “To Andre’s office? You bat-shit? He’ll heave you over without twitching an eyelash, that stupid fart-face. Forget him. He doesn’t count. He only thinks he counts. Now let’s talk before Jane gets back. She’s out looking to comfort you. Of course she heard. Everybody heard. El Stupido Lipscomb needs an audience for everything he does, if you get me. He’s total dreck on toast. Sit down. There’s no time to talk, and anyway I’m not interested in your side of it. You think I have time to hear another actor tell me his life story? Stop looking at me like that. I’m going to help you. I like your wife and she worships the ground you walk on, and if you go she goes and then I’m stuck with this crapola for the rest of the summer. Forget Andre. He wouldn’t know a pile of shit from a hot rock. I know what goes on here. I know Lipscomb’s crazy. You know Lipscomb’s crazy. They’re all crazy. You’re probably crazy too, and if not now I give you two years. But he’s famous crazy and he’s going to be here a week, so you just make yourself scarce. Do you hear me? Nod. Say yes. Show me you have an IQ in the plus column. That’s better. You want to take a week off? You need the money? All right. Go find Dizzy. Ask anybody. He’s the janitor. You stick with him and don’t show your face around here after six o’clock. Dizzy will put you on something. Probab
ly toilets. He hates doing toilets. You could vomit from the ladies’ room. And he hates floors too, but he’s good under the seats. Gets the gum off, which is more than you can say for most of them. Listen, don’t thank me. It’s for her, not you. Anyway, it’s not Shakespeare I’m getting for you, it’s toilets. But what the hell. Twenty years from now maybe you’ll thank me.”

  After the summer, their first home was a forty-five-dollar-a-month cold-water flat on West Forty-sixth Street in Hell’s Kitchen, an immigrant neighborhood that by 1961 had lost its roiling, murderous energy and had fallen past squalor into decay. Their apartment consisted of a kitchen, a three-foot-square toilet, and a back room. (Except for the toilet, it was remarkably similar to the apartment Jane’s grandmother, Rivka Taubman, had lived in on the Lower East Side.)

  Jane made their double bed, a mattress on a metal frame, with pale blue sheets and pillow cases monogrammed JCN, a gift that had arrived with six monogrammed sets of towels when Maisie learned from Win that Jane’s family had not provided her with a trousseau. The other monogrammed gift, a glass punch bowl set with jcn etched on its rim and ladle, sent by James’s cousin Bryan, was packed in the carton it had come in and pushed under the shelves that lined a portion of the longest wall in the room.

  Nearly all the rest of the gifts, a thousand dollars’ worth of salad bowls, sugars and creamers, bud vases, teapots, and demitasse spoons from Cobleigh friends and relatives, had been returned. With some of that money, they’d bought their bed, a kitchen table, and four chairs and equipped the kitchen; what remained they’d agreed to put in the bank. They had seventy-eight dollars left in cash. Jane thought, we’re broke.

  She’d known they would be, and so had Nicholas, but the actual fact of their poverty had been more of a shock to him. He suddenly realized the only way he’d be riding in a taxi was in the driver’s seat. He’d taken Jane to Yankee Stadium on the subway, and they’d sat in the bleachers and shared the one beer and hot dog they could afford. She’d thought it was fun until she caught him staring at the box seats.

  He was not greedy, his demands certainly were not grandiose, but he had never before been without anything he wanted. Just a look at the shelves and the clothing rods on the wall opposite the bed—the toilet took up the apartment’s only closet—declared their differences.

  Her side was dotted with books and the few clothes she’d accumulated during her years at Pembroke. Her clothes came in twos: two summer skirts, two blouses, two sweaters, two pairs of shoes. The only evidence that she’d had a life before college was Rhodes’s still-unframed graduation picture propped up against her Source Book in Theatrical History.

  But Nicholas had clothes for every location, occasion, and climate. His possessions delineated his upbringing. His clothes filled all the extra space she’d had on her shelves. He had rainbows of shirts and sweaters, including three identical yellow crew necks he couldn’t explain, suits, a tuxedo, and jackets and blazers in such wonderful textures she’d rub a sleeve between her fingers each time she passed by. He owned three bathrobes, one of which, a thick white terrycloth, she’d appropriated. If all his shoes had been filled, there would have been a crowd. He owned seven pairs of sports shoes alone, four of them with cleats.

  When she walked into the kitchen, Nicholas was standing in front of the sink naked, just finishing shaving before the retractable mirror he had nailed to the wall. He dropped his razor onto the drainboard with an unnecessarily loud clank. Two large pots sat on high flames on the stove with water for the kitchen tub. He tapped his bare foot, waiting for them to boil.

  He’d been out of sorts for the week and a half they’d been in New York, although the most he’d admit to was being on edge. But on their second night in the apartment, for the first time since their marriage, and again on their fourth and fifth, he hadn’t reached out for her. He’d wakened her several times during those nights, wrestling the blanket away from her, and in the mornings he was sullen, although later he’d explained he hadn’t slept well; he wasn’t used to the neighborhood noises and the new bed.

  Nicholas’s moodiness clouded her delight in the apartment. She’d wanted the cold-water flat, thought it was romantic and sophisticated and eccentric enough to confer special status, making her feel more a true New Yorker, an identity Nicholas naturally never needed to question. She was secretly overjoyed when the only other apartment they could afford, a conventional third-floor walk-up on lower Eighth Avenue, was rented to another couple.

  But although he tried to hide it, Jane knew Nicholas found nearly everything about the place appalling: its chipped, stained porcelain fixtures with splotches of blue and rust around the drains, its walls that peeled the minute the paint they’d applied was dry, its unkillable roaches and endless chain of ants. He hated taking a bath in the old, worn tub. She could see the way his toes curled with disgust before he climbed in. Unlike her, he could never ease down, hang his feet over the edge, close his eyes, and savor the noise of Manhattan.

  She poured herself some orange juice. “Is the water hot enough?” she asked.

  “Fine.” He offered a pleasant, manufactured smile.

  “Nervous?”

  “No.” She saw he felt he owed her more. He smiled again. “Maybe this sounds crazy,” he offered, “but I’m more nervous about driving a cab than about my first audition. I keep worrying that I’ll crack it up or forget where Coney Island is. Or that someone I went to school with will get in. And they’ll ignore me, but then they’ll see my name on the Taxi Commission license. I can just hear them saying ‘Nick? Is that you?’” He made his voice tremulous for the role. She could see he was relishing escaping the reality of the gritty tub for the illusion of being humbled in a cab. “‘What happened, Nick? I mean—’ Or one of my mother’s friends or one of my father’s clients. ‘Um—er, I noticed your name and was wondering, are you any relation to an attorney named Jim Cobleigh? Though there must be Cobleighs all over the place. Oh, you’re his eldest son. How interesting.’ Could you hand me the towel? I left it on the chair.”

  Like the sheets, the towels were light blue with a navy monogram. “Come out,” Jane said. “I’ll be your geisha.” She dried his legs first, before he could drip a puddle onto the kitchen floor. When she reached his back and shoulders she asked, “Do you think they’d give you an extra-big tip if they knew who you were?”

  “I don’t know.” He took the towel from her and rubbed his face. “I wouldn’t take it if they did.”

  “You wouldn’t take what?”

  “A tip from someone I knew.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding.”

  “No I’m not.”

  “But you’re driving a cab to make money.”

  “I don’t make money from my friends.”

  “It’s a job, for heaven’s sake. Work. Employment. Something you do to earn money to pay for things you need, like acting lessons. To say nothing about food, rent—”

  “Just cut out the sarcasm, Jane.” He marched into the bedroom, leaving a path of damp footprints on the speckled linoleum.

  She tried sipping her juice and staying cool, but a moment later followed him inside. He stood before his shelves in undershorts, pondering which shirt to wear to the audition he was going to for an Off Broadway play. “Nick, I’m not being sarcastic. I’m being realistic. We have money in the bank that we can’t touch in case we need it for an emergency. Fine! Okay! But you keep telling me you don’t want me to work. I just want to know, how are we going to afford everything?”

  “You don’t have to screech.”

  “I am not screeching! You won’t sit down and go over a budget with me. If you would, you’d see we won’t be able to cover living expenses and acting lessons unless I get a full-time job, and it makes no sense pretending things are different. Nick, darn it, listen to me! You’ve never had to think about money, and I have. Listen! I know how to apportion—”

  “This is a real help, Jane. Just keep yelling so I can be in a terrific mood w
hen I audition. Come on. Do you want to go on about how I’m just waiting for my family to see how poor we are so they’ll bail us out? Hmm?” He yanked a dark green cotton sweater from a pile, pulled it over his head, pushed up the sleeves, and adjusted the neckline before the small mirror that hung between the two sets of shelves. “Come on, Jane. Look me in the eye. How about telling me what you’re really thinking, that I’m afraid to test myself by acting professionally and I’m just setting things up so I’ll be forced to quit and go to law school? How about a little of that song-and-dance? You’ve got it down pat. It’s a good thing your roommate was a psych major.”

  She sat on the foot of the bed. “I’m just saying we should plan—” She stopped because she felt herself filling up with tears and knew she could not speak. She tried to compose herself, but also found herself waiting for the warmth of Nicholas’s arms around her.

  “Go ahead. Start sobbing now. Then you can make me feel really crummy. Good. That’s very well done. Louder. Louder! You can do it. Deep sobs. Use the old stomach muscles. That’s right. Let your diaphragm push up the air.” She was crying too hard to look up, but she reached out her hand to him. It remained outstretched. Then she heard a crash. And then another and another. He’d gone back to the shelves and was punching her books, knocking them off the shelves. “You’re full of it!” he shouted. “Miss Maturity, let’s-plan-our-lives, and the minute I don’t go along with what you say you pull the crying act. Let them pour out. Go ahead. It’s a real talent, crying on cue.”

  “Nick—”

  “Come on. You’re the genius at understanding what makes everybody else tick. Analyze me some more. Tell me the real reason I want the whole thing to fall apart is that I’m soft. You said it last night. Everything’s come so easy for me.”