by Susan Isaacs
“What are the egg whites for?”
“A cheese soufflé. I guess you answered my question.”
“No. I just want you to finish. Vicky, Liz, would you please? This is a grown-up conversation. Go play Candy-land. Go on. I’ll be with you in five minutes.”
She rested the bowl on the counter. “I’m finished.”
“So is the soufflé. You can’t just leave it like that, can you?”
“Nick, tell me what it is. Come on. You really look—not yourself.”
“All my brothers and sisters and the seven cousins got very nice bequests. She didn’t leave me any money.”
“Nick, you’re kidding! I can’t believe she would do something like that. Why?”
“Are you ready?” Jane nodded. Nicholas reached into his back pocket and pulled out a sheaf of papers. “It’s a copy of the will. ‘To my beloved grandson, Nicholas Tuttle Cobleigh…’”
“I thought you said—”
“Listen: ‘…I bequeath and devise all my right, title, and interest in a certain property known as Tuttle Farm…’”
Jane began to cry.
“It goes on and on describing the boundaries. Wait: ‘…including buildings, livestock, implements, fixtures, and machinery and all other personalty and furnishings appurtenant thereto at the time of my death.’ Do you know what it’s worth? A seventy-five-acre farm in Fairfield County? It’s only an hour and fifteen minutes from midtown. We can live there, Jane. The whole thing is ours. The house. The stables. I can ride every morning. It’s going to be fine.”
“It’s too much.”
“No it’s not.”
“Nick, please listen to me. It’s not right. We didn’t earn it. I know what you’re going to say, but please—”
“Shhh. You’re going to love it. Listen to me, Jane. I know it’s overwhelming. I know how hard it is for you, once you’ve made a nest, to move out of it. If it were up to you, we’d still be in that cold-water flat with the bathtub in the kitchen.”
“We don’t deserve—”
“Jane, they screwed you up to a fare-thee-well and you haven’t the foggiest notion what you deserve. I’m sorry, but it’s true. Let me be the one who decides what you deserve. All right? Just leave it to me. We’re going to be so happy there. You’ll see. Instead of standing sideways in this tight little kitchen, we’ll be sitting back and having our coffee at the breakfast table with a big fire blazing away in the hearth. And in the summer we’ll be swimming in the pond and taking the girls for picnics on the hill overlooking that field of wildflowers. Won’t that be something? It’s going to be fine. Trust me. I know what’s good for us.”
Three months later, after the final performance of House on Fire, Iris Betts, the actress who had spent the entire six-month run of the play trying to lure Nicholas into her dressing room grabbed his arm and moved in so close her breast rubbed against his bicep. “Stop pulling away. I’m not going to bite you,” she said. “Really, Nicky, you’re impossible. You’re the most incorrigibly uxorious man I’ve ever met. What does she have, hmmm? A little something she dabs behind the ears? The thing of it is, you look like such a runaround. A born heartbreaker. Sexy and ice cold and here you are, Husband of the Year. Of the Century.”
“Jane,” Nicholas said. Her back was toward him. She was at the front door, polishing the brass knocker for the third time. The knocker was in the shape of an eagle, and she was rubbing between the talons with a soft rag. Her work shirt, an old pink oxford cloth of his, was streaked with gray tarnish.
She turned to him. A stripe of gray crossed her nose. “If seven years ago, when we graduated, you’d have told me I’d be spending my day cleaning between the toes of a brass Federalist eagle somewhere in Connecticut, I’d have told you you were totally deranged.”
“Take a break for a minute. Come here.” He was stretched out on his back on the lawn in front of the house in a torn undershirt and old jeans. He and his clothes were smeared with the dark green paint he’d been using to paint the window trim and the shutters. She walked toward him. He reached out and grabbed her ankle. “A little love in the afternoon?”
“No.”
“Give me one good reason.”
“I have to finish the knocker. You have half the second floor to do. The hardware store is delivering the steamer to take off the wallpaper, and the girls are due home any second. Good enough?”
“No.”
“You reek of turpentine and the front of your hair is green.”
“Don’t you like green hair?”
“Oh, I love it. But not on you. Sorry, but you just don’t have the flair to carry it off.” She plunked down beside him and crossed her legs. She was wearing shorts. It was late June, but already her legs were dark brown. “You’re more the boring type. Bland. Blond. Dull. You know what I mean.” She bent down and kissed his forehead. “Eminently forgettable.”
“Thanks. Oh. I know what I was going to ask you. Do you think I’m cold-looking?”
“No. Why?”
“Iris Betts said I looked ice cold.”
“Iris Betts isn’t happy unless she sees steam rising from every man she talks to.”
“I forgot how objective you are about her.”
“Well, what kind of woman comes over to someone’s wife and says, ‘That’s some man you have there’? And all those tight knit dresses and five-inch heels, so she looks like a 1958 prostitute.”
“How would you know what a 1958 prostitute looks like? Hmm?” He reached out and rubbed her calf. “Was all that Cincinnati virgin business an act? I’ll bet it was. I’ll bet you were walking around Woodward High School in five-inch heels. A real entrepreneur, keeping up the football team’s spirit and making a living at the same time. All the boys would say, ‘Wow, here comes Heissenhuber,’ and take out their wallets. And take out their—”
“Nick.”
“I heard about you. On your back on the fifty-yard line.”
“I was hoping you wouldn’t find out.”
“You can’t hide anything from me. I know a cheap tramp when I marry one.”
“Nick, be serious for a second. At that party, she behaved like I didn’t matter, that all she had to do was wiggle her finger and you’d run right over me to get to her.”
“She’s not worth worrying about.”
“Yes, she is. You’re my husband.”
“If you let her get you that upset, then you need your head examined. I mean it, Jane. She’s a real pig. They call her the Grand Canyon.”
“Nick!”
“But she can act.”
“She can’t act. She can wiggle.”
“She was very good.”
“She’s good at playing strumpets. If she had to play a nun the audience would stampede for the exits, screaming with laughter. It’s true. Why did she tell you you looked ice cold?”
“Why do you think? It wasn’t her so much. It was being turned down for that deodorant commercial because the casting guy said I looked like a Nazi. That on top of the screen test.”
A movie studio had flown Nicholas to California for a screen test. Afterward, the vice-president in charge of production had told Murray King that Nicholas would not be believable as a Texas rancher. His accent was good, and he could ride, but he looked, in the executive’s words, namby-pamby English. His face photographed too long and the bridge of his nose was much too prominent, although that could be corrected with plastic surgery. As he was, he’d only be suited for character roles.
“The screen test! I can’t understand why you even bothered. I mean it. It was a dopey cowboy movie.”
“Money.”
“You’re making a lot of money in the theater.”
“No I’m not.”
“Compared to any other about-to-be-twenty-eight-year-old man—”
“Jane, that’s not the standard I use when I think of how I want to support my family. Look, you’re the artistic arbiter. Let me be the financial genius. All right? It would be nice
to have a few more dollars and a couple of movie credits under my belt. I’d like to know that if a good play didn’t come along for six months or a year, I could be busy. That’s all.”
“Well, go get your nose bobbed or whatever.”
“Can you believe that? The bridge of my nose is unacceptable, so I’m unacceptable.” He rubbed his nose. “Oh, and my bottom teeth are crooked and my eyes are a fraction of an inch too close together. Did you know that?”
“Yes, but I didn’t want to hurt your feelings.”
“Jane, if my eyes were a twentieth of an inch farther apart we could have Victoria’s freshman and sophomore years paid for.”
“Stop worrying about how you look. You look fine. I mean, we can’t walk into Sardi’s without some lady poking her husband and saying ‘Oooh, that’s him! Him! Isn’t he gaw-geous?’”
“I’m not gaw-geous. You’re gaw-geous.”
“You’re gaw-geouser,” she said. “You know you are.”
“Lie down. Come on. I just want to hug you. We can hear cars driving up five minutes before they can see us. Oh, that’s nice.”
“I don’t think you’re ice cold.”
“I know. I’m not.”
“If you want to know the truth, I think you’re pretty hot stuff.”
“I think you’re pretty hot stuff,” Nicholas responded. She edged closer, so their noses touched. He took her hands in his. “Isn’t this wonderful?” he demanded. “Our own grass. Our own house. Our own perfectly polished brass knocker.” Her hands were rough from weeks of refurbishing. Her nails were short and jagged. He kissed the tips of her fingers. “This is paradise.”
“Almost,” she said. “It’ll be paradise when all the bathrooms are papered.”
Maybe he was uxorious. He’d looked it up: foolishly fond of one’s wife. He wasn’t foolish about her. He loved her. Foolish would be getting involved with Iris Betts. Or any of them.
What did they want from him, a fast roll in the hay? And did they think the best way to get him was sneaking up behind him when he was waiting in the wings for his cue—like the producer’s wife of Romeo and Juliet—and sticking her tongue in his ear? With three or four people standing around. Didn’t she care? What did she think she was going to accomplish? Or that other one, coming up to him after an Actors Against the War rally and instead of saying, “Hi, I’m Mary Smith” or whatever it was, saying, “I want to suck you out”? He’d never seen her before. She wore flat shoes and a cardigan sweater with pockets and looked like a social worker. He was positive he’d heard her wrong until she added, “I want to swallow every drop.” Was that what he was supposed to risk his marriage for? Or for some jiggling pig like Iris Betts who walked into his dressing room, turned her back to him, slipped off her robe, and said, “Hook my bra for me, Nicky,” and then got all hot and huffy when he blew up and told her to get the hell out?
Or did they expect him to have an affair with them, the way that costume designer did, after she’d asked him all about Vicky and Liz, asked to see pictures, asked all about living in Connecticut, asked him about Jane, for Christ’s sake? Did they think that was the key to his heart, making him talk about his family during out-of-town tryouts and then putting a hand on his and saying, “I’ll bet it’s lonesome for you, hon”?
Objectively, he knew that all the majority of women would do was say Hello, how are you, hasn’t the weather been awful? But almost every day now he felt assaulted by the minority. In school and college, girls had flirted but if he didn’t respond they’d go and flirt with someone else. Now if he didn’t respond, they tried again, harder. And they no longer began by fluttering their eyelashes. They began by offering their hand to shake and then scratching his palm with a fingernail.
Some of them were all right. Bitsy Kagan, who’d been two years behind Jane at Pembroke, who’d been in Sock and Buskin, had moved to New York and was trying to make it as a lighting designer. She never did anything overt, but she managed to be backstage at whatever play he was in, visiting a friend, at least one night a week. Or she’d call Jane at home and cry that she was down in the dumps and Jane would pressure him to take Bitsy out for a drink and cheer her up. Bitsy never came on to him, but she’d stand beside him at Joe Allen’s, her face so eager he felt sick for her.
They all wanted so much. He could see it in their eyes. They all seemed to know precisely what he did not: exactly what he should do for them.
Sometimes he could read between the lines. He’d gotten a letter at the theater. The notepaper had been engraved Mrs. Floyd Childers III with an asterisk inked next to the name; at the bottom was alias Diana Howard. She’d written about how “gloriously right” he’d been in The Importance of Being Earnest and how much she and Floyd would love to see him and Jane if they had a free night—We’re in Darien, barely the blink of an eyelash away from you good folk—but if their social calendar was filled, she—inveterate theatergoer that I am—would love to meet him one Wednesday before or after his matinee so we might reminisce about our warm, wonderful, ancient days together. He couldn’t believe he’d come close to marrying someone who could write such a jerky letter. He wanted to show it to Jane because it was so funny and so awful, but he realized the humor might elude her. He’d dropped Diana a note saying he was busy with rehearsals, but he and Jane looked forward to seeing her and Floyd in the near future. A lie.
And what did the strangers want? They wrote to him at the theater saying how much they loved his performance and asked, Remember me? The one in the fourth row you were looking at (I think!?!) Thursday night. I have shoulder-length frosted hair and was wearing a lilac mandarin collar shirtdress. Or their letters said they’d love to discuss his interpretation of Algernon Moncrieff with him—perhaps you played it a tad too tongue-in-cheek, Mr. Cobleigh, but then again, perhaps not. Did they expect him to call and say, Hi. It’s Nicholas Cobleigh. Let’s meet for a drink and discuss my interpretation of Algernon Moncrieff?
Did the women who waited at the stage door want anything more than a smile and his autograph? What did the one with the camera want? She was there almost every night, with a camera and flash, and she snapped her one picture and disappeared toward Ninth Avenue. Her hair was so sparse, patches of scalp showed. She only looked at him through the camera. He never saw her eyes. Once he’d tried leaving a half hour late, but she’d been there, alone, waiting, and snapped his picture.
Did his being an actor bring it out? He hadn’t wanted to belabor the subject of other women with Jane, but the couple of times he’d talked about it with her she’d ventured it might have something to do with the actor as role player. Just as actors became the characters the playwrights delineated, so they were chosen to flesh out roles in people’s imaginations. Also, Jane had said, you’re safe. You’re not real to them. You’re on the stage.
But she’d been thinking about fans. He was real enough to Iris Betts. If he were a lawyer, he couldn’t imagine a woman lawyer or a secretary coming into his office and closing the door and saying “Hook my bra.” It wasn’t that lawyers weren’t interested in sex; look at his father. His father had been better-looking than he, but he couldn’t believe his father was pursued in the way he was. Picked at. As though the women were hungry birds wanting to peck out pieces of him.
He didn’t know what any of them wanted really, and he suspected if he did try and satisfy them it wouldn’t be enough. Early, during rehearsals, Iris Betts had taken his face in her hands and said, “Now what would it be like to see this face with this magnificent hair on a black satin pillowcase in a candlelit room? Hundreds of flickering candles.” He’d pulled away, thinking it sounded awful, like some weird black mass. But later he realized Iris Betts wasn’t worrying about what he thought. He really didn’t matter. Her image of him was better than he could ever be. She’d imagined him so clearly that if he actually took her to bed she’d be disappointed. Probably angry too, because he’d failed her.
He rejected them all, gently or brusquely. Usually they
were out of his mind before they were out of the room. Now and then one made an impression. He remembered the Washington Star reporter who came to interview him during tryouts for House on Fire; she’d worn a pink minidress and had sat across from him in a club chair in his hotel room. Her dress inched up and he could see the top of her white lace tights. She had spectacular legs, and every few minutes she’d cross or uncross them. He could hear lace against lace. He’d gotten a hard-on and had crossed his legs and clasped his hands in his lap and then realized she knew exactly what he was doing. She spread her legs apart so he could see the crotch of her tights. What did she want from him, to grab her and throw her onto the bed? When the interview was over she dropped her pen, and when she bent over to pick it up he could see her whole ass, the tights stuck in the crack between the cheeks. She wasn’t wearing underpants; he could see pink flesh gleaming under the white fabric. Did she want to get laid? Was she just teasing him, trying to see how worked up she could get him? He’d walked her to the door and as he was saying goodbye she’d put her ballpoint pen up to her mouth and flicked the little button up and down with her tongue. He’d closed the door behind her, gone into the bathroom, and jerked off into a washcloth. He came in about thirty seconds, but it had taken nearly a half hour for him to feel steady enough to call Jane.
He had a right to be uxorious. She was a wonderful wife. She was a good mother. He’d been a little worried, because the only one she’d had to learn from had been Dorothy Heissenhuber, but Jane the mother was like Jane the person: loving, funny, eager to please, and painfully insecure. He had to reassure her all the time that she was doing a good job. Of course you had to yell at Vicky, he’d say. She was being a royal pain. Come on, Jane. She’ll get over it.
She’d been such a terrible cook that one Valentine’s Day he’d given her a French cookbook, hoping she’d take the hint. She did. Within a few months she could have gotten a job in a three-star restaurant in Paris. If he didn’t stop her, she’d spend an entire day making a sauce. Until they’d moved from the city, his father had taken to dropping in once or twice a week around dinnertime, ostensibly to see the children but actually because he liked Jane’s cooking—and Jane.