Almost Paradise

by Susan Isaacs

  She was able to whisper, “I didn’t mean…” and then lost her voice.

  Nicholas ripped a pair of pants off the hanger. “You’re the only one who ever suffered. You’re the only one who knows about money. You’re the only one who knows about acting. My mother is some flighty society woman, but your mother—well, your mother made Sarah Bernhardt look like an amateur. And since you’re positive you inherited your gift from the great Sally Tompkins—whom you can’t even remember—then who am I to get in the way of the plans you’re making for me? You’re the one with the theater in your blood. Go ahead, Jane, spit it out. The truth. You don’t think I can do it, do you? You keep saying how my looks are going to make it easy for me, and what you really mean is that’s all I have going for me.”

  “Nick, no!”

  “A-minus looks. I’m no Rhodes Heissenhuber, after all. And C-plus talent. Say what you’re thinking. My whole family thinks actors are weirdos and sickies, and deep down that’s what I believe too. So I’m trying to sabotage everything. Right? Is that right? But at least, at least you thought you could take me over, make up for all my weaknesses, turn me into just what you wanted me to be. You thought I’d be pliable, but I turned out to have a mind of my own.”

  “Nick, I swear I never—”

  “This is tough for a great planner like you to swallow, isn’t it? I won’t try out for that stupid medieval morality play downtown with the rest of those creeps. I won’t study with that halfassed acting teacher you and Ritter think I should go to—‘Make believe you’re a candle and melt’: what bull! I won’t let you go to work and be the noble, sacrificing woman. I won’t do a damn thing you want me to do. Too bad, isn’t it? You didn’t get what you wanted. Do you know what you want? You want to run the show. You want to be the man. And I won’t let you. Isn’t that too goddamn bad.”

  The director and the playwright were feuding, so the audition did not begin until two, and since that first week he was to drive on the four-to-midnight shift, he’d had to leave at three thirty, without having a chance to try out. His last fare took him to central Queens, and since his only knowledge of that borough came from trips to the tennis matches and the airports he did not find his way back to the garage until well after midnight. Then he had to wait twenty minutes for a subway.

  He hadn’t been able to call Jane because they hadn’t gotten their telephone.

  But he’d thought about her all day.

  At the audition, he couldn’t study his lines. He didn’t want to think about playing an aspiring middleweight contender. He could only think of what a terrible first home she’d come from, and now, less than two weeks into her second one, he’d undermined all the faith she’d had in him. He knew how little confidence she had, yet he’d attacked her. And since she didn’t have the confidence to fight back, the way his brothers and sisters routinely had, the way Diana had, his anger had gone unchecked and unsatisfied and he’d attacked her even harder. He knew he was all she had. She had no family to back her up, no money; everything she owned fit into a large suitcase. She was alone in a slum in a strange city. He was the only person she knew in New York.

  At the garage, the drivers told him to encourage chatty passengers; they would often give larger tips. But his first day driving a taxi was a silent one. He could only think that since he’d met her, he was happier than he had ever thought possible. She’d brought him to life. Only she knew what was in him. Only she could evoke it. He’d been loved before, but only Jane did it so well. She never wanted pieces of him: his looks or pedigree to parade around, his fraternity pin, his body, his friends, his self-assurance. She didn’t want anything. She simply loved him.

  On the subway, he thought how much he desired her, even though he had never been with anyone less accomplished with men. She made love like an awkward girl, pulling back every few minutes for reassurance that she was doing it right. She was so prudish she would only undress in the dark, and he knew that even though she had moments of great passion, she could never let herself go completely. Yet he thought her the most desirable woman in the world. He was enamored of her body, her hair, her velvet skin. He was enamored of her.

  He ran the five blocks from the subway to their apartment and up the five flights of steps. By the time he reached the door he knew that if he hadn’t met Jane, his life would have continued as it had, full of attractive people and congenial events; it would have been so pleasant a life he never could have comprehended his own sadness. He knew he needed her as much as she needed him.

  She’d heard him coming. She opened the door and said “Nick, I’m sorry,” but her face was so grieved it did not appear that she thought she would be forgiven. He led her into the apartment and closed the door. He wrapped himself around her. “I’m so sorry,” she murmured. “Please, Nick. Forgive me.”

  “Jane, there’s nothing—”

  “Please, Nick.”

  “I forgive you.”

  The following week, he finally conceded he could not drive a cab five days and take acting lessons, audition, and perform in a play—if that ever happened, he added. He agreed to let Jane take a job for six months to a year, until he was earning enough to support them both.

  After three weeks, she found a job in the reader mail department of Deb, which proclaimed itself “The Magazine for Today’s Top Teen,” answering letters that demanded Dear Deb, I need help. I maybe pregnate. How do you know? or Dear Deb, Why don’t you ever write about the Numero Uno Rock Group in all the U.S. of A.? Anthony Monte and the Starshines!!! Tony, Tony he’s my man. If he can’t do it, no one can!!!!

  The head of the reader mail department, a woman named Dina, was a Radcliffe graduate in her late twenties who, on Jane’s first day at work, asked if Jane’s husband had any single friends from any of the Ivy League schools or Amherst. Dina’s features were so stretched out her face seemed contorted, like a mannerist portrait. The other woman in the department, Marge, a University of Chicago graduate, was under five feet and one hundred pounds, and her preoccupation with her own diminutiveness dominated her conversation. On Jane’s first day, Marge told her that whenever she went home to her parents’ in Lake Forest, Illinois, she slept in the same youth bed she’d been sleeping in since she’d given up her crib at two and a half. She confided that her father’s thigh was thicker than her waist.

  It occurred to Jane that the three of them, as well as the twenty or so other young women who worked at Deb, were embarrassingly overqualified for their jobs, that a degree from a prestigious college was not necessary for responding to letters requesting reprints of the article: “Mastering the Finest Art: How to Write a Letter to a Boy.”

  Still, the job was more enjoyable than not. Deb was the Pembroke dormitory in high heels and dark dresses. If most of her co-workers were subsidized by their wealthy families, she found that no different from college; she was used to being the scholarship student. In fact, much as her college friends had found her summer employment as a chambermaid noble and exotic, her co-workers listened to her tales of poverty—the lack of heat during a ten-degree night, the endless tuna-noodle casseroles Nicholas endured—as compelling as the stories of Scheherazade.

  Their interest in her burgeoned after the evening Nicholas picked her up at work. Dina said virtually nothing while Nicholas was there, but the next day she told Jane, “You’d better watch out, Mrs. Nicholas Cobleigh. All the girls are going to start sticking pins into little dolls with long black hair.” Marge said, “I’ll bet if he held my hand very tight he would crush it.”

  “You were a hit,” she told him. “Even the beauty editor, Charlotte, was impressed. She told me you were some hunk of man. Normally she only speaks to other senior editors. And the managing editor heard about you and said next time you come to pick me up, I should bring you down to her office. Maybe I’ll wait another few months and bring you in, and while she’s dazzled I’ll ask her for a raise. I’ll say, ‘You see this hunk of man? Well, Hunk and I are getting a little tired of sneaki
ng in after intermission and only seeing the second and third acts of plays. We want to buy tickets. Hunk loves first acts.’ How about that? Does that sound good, Hunk?”

  “Pretty good. Do you want to know what else sounds good? Look on the table, at what I circled in Backstage.”

  “Oh, wow! ‘Young lawyer, good looks, Ivy League type.’ Oh, when’s the audition? Oh, God, tomorrow. I hope, I hope…Never mind. I don’t want to say it.”

  “Say it. I won’t take off points if you’re wrong.”

  “This sounds right, Nick. I don’t know why, but I have a feeling this may be it.”

  The letter Jane had been waiting for arrived the next day, just after Nicholas left for his audition.

  Dear Jane,

  Have you and Nick taken the Great White Way by storm yet? If not, why not?

  I’m glad you tracked me down. The two letters I sent to the Westport Playhouse came back, and I couldn’t figure out why I hadn’t heard from you. I really didn’t worry too much because no one your size could ever get lost.

  However, your friend Lynn was not exactly subtle in the way she contacted me. Yesterday, the second I walked out of the house, there’s this screaming-red MG with a lady at the wheel who looked at least fourteen months pregnant. [Jane’s high school friend, Lynn Friedman, had, at nineteen, married a forty-year-old widower, a surgeon.] I mean, so pregnant they probably have to grease her to get her into the car. Anyhow, she was all dressed up for a secret mission, with a chiffon scarf tied around her head with flowing ends à la Isadora Duncan and huge sunglasses even though it was cloudy and about to snow. But she’s still the same old Lynn, can’t act for beans, and she kept beeping her horn until all Hamilton County, to say nothing of Mom, noticed her, and calling “Rhodes! Rhodes!” She said she was “heartbroken” to have missed you in June, but she and the eminent doctor were in Europe with a bunch of ear, nose, and throaters…. More about Europe and me later. She wanted to know if Nick was good enough for you, and I said much better than you deserved.

  Anyway, she said you wrote her that you sent me a thousand letters and since I hadn’t answered you thought (a) I was dead or (b) Mom burned them, and she handed me a piece of paper with your address. Then she told me the news!!!!! Wow!!!!! I can’t believe he actually married you. Oops. Did I say the wrong thing? Did he come to his senses and leave you for someone worthy of him? Anyway, if he’s still around, give him my regards and my pity.

  Now, on to the Big E, i.e., Europe. I was there! I left the second week of July with the Grays—Mr. & Mrs. plus Amanda. Amanda was her usual scintillating self. She said two words per country.

  We spent a week in London, five days in Paris, then on to the south of France, where we drove around visiting people in little villages that are so chic you couldn’t have heard about them. Then Mr. G and I drove off north and spent another week and a half looking at vineyards, which are his latest investment craze. We stayed in an old château!

  Now, promise me you won’t have a shit fit. I’m not going to Lafayette. Okay, stop screaming. The reason I’m not going is that I have a great job that I love and I’m learning all about high finance. Don’t worry, I’ll be going to UC. They have great business administration courses, and naturally I’ll take a load of liberal arts too. If I change my mind, I can always transfer.

  Also, if I stay in Cincinnati, Mr. Gray will pay for college since I’m an employee, which is a much better deal than Lafayette, because unlike some smart people, I did not get a scholarship.

  Please write to me c/o Philip Gray at the box number above. He’ll make sure I get your letters. I may, since I’m earning some $$$, get my own place, but he thinks it might upset Mom and Dad because I’m only eighteen. But it would be nice not to have to come home and get grilled on everything I did all day and where I had lunch and what kind of sauce they served on the vegetables.

  Have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year and give Nick my best. Don’t worry, Lady Covetous, I’m sending your present separately. By the way, we’ll probably be coming to N.Y. soon. I’ll let you know when so you can wine me and dine me.

  Please don’t be mad at me. I know you may not think what I’m doing is the right thing for me, but I’ve really never been happier in all my life. Really.

  Of course, the letter was signed Love, Rhodes.

  “Nick, you smell like baby powder.”

  “I’m not Nick. I’m Harding Claybourne, Yale Law School, and I’m totally evil and corrupting.”

  “Harding, I just love evil lawyers.”

  “Jane, stop. I can’t stay in character if you put your freezing cold feet on my legs. Wrap the blanket around them. Don’t move away. I want everything but your feet. Where was I?”

  “You were being totally corrupt.”

  “That’s right. I’m having simultaneous affairs with a widow and her heiress daughter. The play is really about them, about the breakdown of love and trust. I’m just the snake.”

  “Just the snake? That’s like saying ‘Just Iago.’”

  “Jane, it’s a relatively minor character. And it’s not a major production. It’s as Off Broadway as you can get.”

  “Nick, come on. They loved you at the audition.”

  “I couldn’t believe it. One of them, I couldn’t tell if it was the author or one of the others, said ‘That’s my Harding!’ after I had read two sentences. The director said he wants an upper-class accent and an icy sensuality. I’m—take your feet away; that’s not the kind of ice they want—I’m supposed to speak like this: ‘I cahn’t dispense with the canon of ethics entirely, Lorraine dahling,’ while I’m sneaking my hand up her skirt—the mother’s skirt. I’ve just finished planking the daughter and getting her to contest her father’s bequest to her mother. Then the daughter comes in and while the mother is making a sneaky phone call to demand the entire will be contested, I stand behind the daughter and start kissing her neck.”

  “Can’t you just shake hands with them?”

  “Jane, I’m the personification of capitalist decadence.”

  “I know, Harding.”

  “I’m lust poisoning love. I’m avarice. I may be Satan himself. The director says he’ll decide by Monday.”

  “That would be nice: to have a little hell-fire here whenever the boiler breaks down.”

  “Can you believe this? A real part in a real play. For a huge forty dollars a week.”

  “Nick—”

  “Harding.”

  “Harding, I love you. Oh.”

  “Relax. I’m rehearsing putting my hand up a skirt. Like this. Slowly. Tell me if I’m convincing. Does it seem like I’m acting? Hmmm? Or does it seem authentic?”

  14

  I’d like to quote her. She once said, “If my husband sneezes, it’s reported in the press as double pneumonia. The Times instantly updates its obituary, the Village Voice has a debate on whether sneezing is a political or an artistic statement and the scandal sheets offer bribes for his Kleenex so they can analyze it for cocaine.” I can’t but wonder what the very forthright Jane Cobleigh would say about the press coverage she herself is now receiving.

  —Professor Edmond Coller, Columbia School of Journalism, interviewed on National Public Radio

  The only chairs in their apartment were the four ladder-back kitchen chairs, so they spent most of their time on the blue field of their bed. Their serious discussions were held seated beside each other at the foot. Whenever they gossiped or unraveled the day’s events for each other, they reclined, their heads just far enough apart to watch the other’s expression.

  When Nicholas told Jane about his father’s philandering, their bodies formed a T; he used her stomach as a pillow and closed his eyes, like someone hypnotized, as he recounted his seduction by James’s mistress Lucy Bogard, the opera singer.

  Jane could speak about her childhood only when she curled close to Nicholas, her head in the niche between his chin and shoulder.

  Their casual conversational posture was more improv
isational, although Jane tended to sit on her side of the mattress Indian style. Nicholas, always confined by the small space of their apartment, preferred to lie spread-eagled but in motion, stretching and flexing his legs as he spoke.

  But he caught Jane’s attention when he lay flat and still, his hands on his chest.

  “Do you want a lily and your navy blue suit?” she demanded.

  “I’m thinking about Harding Claybourne. Why is he so rotten?”

  “I give up.”

  “No, I’m asking you. I can’t get a handle on his character.”

  Nicholas sat up and faced Jane. When he was perplexed, he sucked in his upper lip and thrust out his lower. She thought it made him look like a little boy trying to look serious. “Every time I speak to the director, Dave says to play him unfeeling and play him upper class, but he can’t tell me why Harding is such a bastard. He just says everything’s been bred out of Harding except the will to power. He has to dominate.”

  “Harding Claybourne?”

  “Yes. Dave couldn’t dominate anything. Every time I ask him what he wants, he says ‘What do you want?’”

  Jane’s impulse was to hug and comfort him. She held back only because she knew she could not. He was in the midst of a problem he couldn’t solve. Still, it was hard not to try to succor him; there was something about Nicholas that made people want to make him happy. She was not sure whether it was charisma, something in his manner drawing people to him, or if it was his appearance.