by Susan Isaacs
25
…that Nicholas Cobleigh has Long Island roots as well. In fact, Tuttle Pond, just west of Locust Valley, is named for his…
—Newsday, Long Island
Judson Fullerton sat in a pink padded chair that looked as if it came from a 1950s beauty salon. “I feel uncomfortable,” he said. A paper towel, tucked in at the neck, covered the front of his shirt.
“Doc,” the makeup man said, “normally I don’t pressure men into makeup if they don’t want to, but you’ll be sitting next to Mrs. Cobleigh.” He turned and smiled at Jane. Jane smiled back and the man smiled even more broadly, no doubt hoping he could someday smile his way into Nicholas Cobleigh’s dressing room. He turned back to the psychiatrist and blended pancake makeup over his nose with a damp sponge. “You see, she’s got this very intense color and you’ll be sitting between her and Gary, and Gary’s ultra tan plus wears makeup, so you’ll look like a cadaver without anything on.” The makeup man whirled the chair around so Jane could see him. “What do you think?”
“Maybe a little blue eyeshadow,” she said.
Judson flushed and took off the paper towel. The makeup man looked quizzical for an instant and then laughed, a deep Santa Claus ho-ho-ho, much heartier than necessary. “You’re a real kidder!” he observed. Then lowering his voice to espionage level, he asked, “Do you kid around with your husband?”
“Sometimes,” she said very softly. She noticed that Judson cracked a smile.
“Speaking of blue eyeshadow,” the makeup man said, “don’t let anyone talk you into it. Ever, ever. A little highlighter under the eyes and gobs of mascara. Just goop it on. All you have to do is frame those gorgeous eyes. Now tell me, who talked you into that eyeliner? Some ditz at Bloomingdale’s?”
“My husband’s makeup man.”
“Jane—can I call you Jane?” She nodded. “A lit-tle eyeliner is okay on blondies. It defines. Separates their pale skin from the whites of their eyes. If you had your husband’s coloring, I’d be screaming ‘Bring on the medium brown pencil this second!’ But with your skin color and especially with those magnificent eyes, it’s adding coals to Newcastle. You know what I’m saying?” She nodded. “Is this your first TV show?” the makeup man asked.
“Yes.”
“You’ll be fabulous. The camera is going to fall in love with you.” He reached over and patted her cheek. “You’re not nervous, are you? Oh, come on! You’ve got it made.”
A short girl with a clipboard and two pencils sticking out from her frizzled hair led them to the area behind the set. “Just stand back here,” she whispered. “I’ll come back and seat you during the break.”
“How are you doing?” Judson asked.
It made her nervous to be standing so close to him. “A little nervous.” Her whisper sounded weak to her. “What if I get an attack when I’m sitting there?”
“You tell me. What if you get an attack?”
“Face it,” she said. “Get right into it.”
He nodded. He looked very distinguished. Not in the stereotypical psychiatrist mode—a pipe and elbow patches—but in a light gray suit, red raw silk tie, and a white handkerchief arranged into many little peaks in his breast pocket. He could be a diplomat or a quiet titan of industry.
She had never really stood beside him. He was taller than she, about six feet. The makeup and the dim backstage light smoothed out his face, making him look ten years younger. It did not make him good-looking. Without exception, his features were bland and too small for his large face. His jaw was soft and ill defined, so his face seemed to flow into his neck.
“Are you nervous?” she asked. Immediately she felt embarrassed. She had never asked him a personal question.
“A little.”
Instead of letting it go, she dug herself in deeper. “What’s your biggest fear?”
“Are you the psychiatrist now?” he asked.
She flushed. “You’re being evasive,” she said. Bold. That’s what her stepmother would have said: You’re such a bold girl.
She didn’t feel bold. She felt frightened. He must be aware of her attempts to sound relaxed and lighthearted with him and—if he was capable of pity, which she couldn’t tell—feel sorry for her. This must happen all the time: women trying too hard to appear easy. She wondered if it meant anything to him. Psychiatrists weren’t supposed to take it personally, but she wondered if somewhere in their minds they kept a list and checked off, with a little internal smile, each woman patient as she inevitably succumbed.
He patted her arm. It took all her control not to flinch from the shock of his touching her. “I am being evasive,” he said. “Let me see. I’ve been on radio several times and done fairly well, but this is much more intimidating.” He looked at the lighting and the booms beyond the flats, hanging over the set. “I suppose I’m afraid my voice will crack. That’s it. That I’ll be appearing on Talk, on national television, and squeaking like a prepubescent boy.”
“And the whole world will hear you squeak, and until the end of time people are going to come up to you and say ‘Hi, Dr. Fullerton.’” She squeaked the greeting. “Is that it?”
He patted her arm again. “I’m sure we’ll both be fine.”
She wondered what his wife was like. She had two possibilities. One was a middle-aged woman, very thin, with hollows under her high cheekbones and short gray hair brushed away from her face. She had originally imagined someone dumpier, in tie-dyed Indian cotton skirts and a great deal of ethnic jewelry, but then decided such a woman would not match Judson Fullerton. The other possibility disturbed her more. Someone in her late twenties. Small, but a superb athlete, always in tennis clothes. A second wife who made him feel young again.
“Let’s go,” the girl with the clipboard suddenly said. Jane jumped. “As quickly as possible, and don’t trip over the cables.”
“Thank you, Dr. Fullerton,” Gary Clifford said. His voice was such a rich baritone that all during the time he was questioning Judson, Jane half expected him to burst into song. He gazed into the camera. “Now that’s dedication,” he said. He looked like an Italian singer. His features were Mediterranean and powerful, his skin was bronzed to brilliance, and his teeth were flawless white chiclets. His black curls shone in the light. They were the sort of curls women would want to stick their fingers into. He was perfect show business. Any moment he could break into “Arrivederci Roma.” Instead, he turned to her. “All right, Jane Cobleigh. It’s your turn now on Talk. Are you ready to talk about phobias?”
“Unless I have a panic attack and go screeching off the set,” she said. She gazed straight into his eyes.
“Ha-ha-ha!” Gary Clifford chortled. People on Talk laughed too hard.
“But then they could replay it on the six o’clock news.”
“Ha-ha-ha!”
“Good publicity, I guess.”
She smiled at him. The only thing Nicholas would tell her about how to behave on television was to look directly at the person speaking to you and never look at the cameras or any of the equipment. When she’d asked him to pretend to be the interviewer, he’d simply breathed “Jesus Christ” and walked out, leaving his dinner unfinished on the kitchen table.
“Are you nervous now, Jane?” Gary Clifford asked.
“Yes. Of course I am. But it has nothing to do with being phobic, at least I don’t think so. Right now I’m nervous because I’m on television. Housewives don’t normally sit around in the afternoon being interviewed by Gary Clifford.”
Gary Clifford beamed at her. She forced herself not to look at the monitor. She smiled back at him. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the gray sleeve of Judson Fullerton’s jacket.
“Phobias are different from normal, reasonable fears,” she continued. “I mean, I guess it’s normal for me to be nervous being here today.”
Gary Clifford reached across the set’s coffee table and patted her hand. Everyone was patting her today. Except for Nicholas. He had left the day before on
a fishing trip to Canada with his father and his brother Michael, saying pointedly that he wanted quiet: no radios or television up there, he’d said.
“But phobias aren’t a normal response to anything,” she went on. “There was no rational reason why I spent two years barely able to get into a car, avoiding going to town—we live near a tiny town in Connecticut. It’s not as if it were Manhattan, big and noisy and overwhelming. It’s underwhelming. And after that I spent another six years unable to leave the house. Literally. I could not stand in an open doorway. I couldn’t take even one step into my back yard.”
“Would you call it a mental illness?” Gary Clifford asked gently.
“Absolutely not. But I would have called it that, if you’d asked me eighteen months ago. I’d have said, Yes, I’m a sick woman. I can’t function. I can’t perform the simplest tasks of normal life. I can’t go outside and cut roses. I can’t visit a friend. I can’t take a walk with my husband.” Her eyes began to brim with tears. She couldn’t believe she was being so emotional on television. It was awful. She blinked. Partly awful. The housewife was humiliated. The actress lifted her finger, wiped away a tear from beneath her eye which had not even fallen, and said, “When my daughter played Pocahontas in the fourth grade, I had to tell her I couldn’t go.” She sniffled twice, half shaken, half amazed at her audacity. “She said, ‘Please, Mommy, just try. For me.’ And I couldn’t.” Jane covered her face with her hands for an instant, then took them away. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m fine now.”
Gary Clifford’s big brown eyes were misted over. “Jane,” he said tenderly, “tell us more.”
“Really,” Jane said, “it was just show business hyperbole. When they say superb it means tolerable. Brilliant means pretty good. At least they didn’t say, ‘I’m speechless.’ That means you were so bad you should have been exposed on a mountaintop at birth. Nick was once in this terrible Off Broadway turkey, something called Stupor, and at the cast party someone came up and put his hand on Nick’s shoulder and said, ‘Nick, what is there to say about your performance? There just aren’t any words.’”
She and Judson Fullerton were in a small marble oasis between four elevator doors. On either side, narrow trails of brown tweed carpet rolled along the network corridors toward infinity.
“But you were good,” Judson said. His face was so bright it looked sore. Immediately after the show, he’d gone into the men’s room and scrubbed off his makeup, but he’d missed his upper lip, so he appeared to have an apricot-colored mustache.
“So were you,” Jane said. She pushed the button to summon the elevator even though she’d done it a moment before. “It’s taking a long time to get up here. If it doesn’t come in a minute, I’ll probably work myself up into a major elevator phobia.” She glanced at him. His expression rarely changed. He seemed to be concentrating so intently on what was being said that he could not express his reaction to it: to laugh or raise his eyebrows might mean to miss the crucial nuance. “At least it would be convenient. I mean, to get elevatoraphobia with you right here. I could be cured by the time we got to the ground floor.”
He obviously felt he did not have to respond. They waited. A highpitched ding signaled the elevator’s arrival. There were enough people in it so she would not be tempted to talk again. She relaxed; her shoulders actually slumped with relief. Once she started talking to him, she got nervous and babbled. She was sure he didn’t like it; he was too economical.
Maybe that was why he’d stopped being a Freudian or whatever he’d been and become a behaviorist; ten or fifteen years, forty-eight weeks a year, forty-eight hours a week of babbling free association was simply too much for his nature to bear. She sneaked a fast glance at him. He was peering up at the floor indicator. His gold collar pin grasped the two rounded ends of his collar in perfect symmetry. He liked things crisp and controlled. He didn’t like babblers.
Outside, the early evening air was unusually dry and cool for late July, as if, as a final courtesy, NBC had arranged for the streets around Rockefeller Center to be air conditioned. The last of the office workers leaving their buildings sensed the specialness of the evening, and instead of hurtling themselves eastward and westward toward the subways, they strolled, swinging attaché cases and handbags. Still, Judson ran his finger under the high collar of his shirt, as though it were a scorcher. They had not spoken since they’d gotten on the elevator. She couldn’t decide whether just to say goodbye or to shake his hand and say something like Thanks for everything, or a lower-key Nice seeing you again.
“Where are you going from here?” he asked.
“You mean tonight?”
“Yes.”
“I couldn’t tell whether you were asking a regular question or a cosmic question, like where is my entire life going.” She was babbling again. He wasn’t even looking at her; he was looking down, adjusting one of the peaks in his pocket handkerchief. “Tonight. Well, we have a place uptown. On Fifth and Seventy-fifth.” She was giving too much information. “I guess I’ll just walk home, kick off my shoes, and have a minor breakdown. I mean, from nerves from the show. I wasn’t nervous when I was on, but I was before and after.”
“Was your husband watching?”
“No. He’s in Canada on a fishing trip.” She shifted her shoulder bag higher and stuck her hands into the big pockets of her flared skirt. “He didn’t want to see me on TV.”
“He’s still upset that you’re talking about your agoraphobia.”
“It’s in direct proportion. Every time I open my mouth, he gets more furious. He thinks what I’m doing is absolutely tasteless, like one of those third-rate actresses going on the Johnny Carson show to promote their autobiographies, discussing all their sleazy love affairs and how terrible their parents were to them.”
“How do you feel about it?”
“I think he’s wrong.”
Without discussion, they began walking together, eastward toward Fifth Avenue, then uptown. He looked straight ahead as he walked, as if walking took as much concentration as talking, and it gave her a chance to study him. Although he was fair-skinned, with graying, light brown hair, he had a heavy beard. Dark prickles were sticking out around his short sideburns down to his chin. It was an excess she was sure he didn’t like. Every once in a while, she’d get a whiff of pine fragrance. She wasn’t sure if it was his aftershave or the scent of trees in Central Park. She wished he would say something to indicate if he was being polite and walking her back to her apartment or if he had an appointment uptown.
“Would you like to go for a drink?” he asked suddenly.
Jane made herself keep walking at the same pace, although she was certain she was going to trip on a crack in the pavement, splat, right on the sidewalk; her skirt would fly up. “Yes,” she said. “Fine.” The “fine” was unnecessary. If she didn’t watch it, she’d say: Terrific. I’d love it. Isn’t that nice of you to ask me. Thank you so much. Wow. Gee.
The irony was, she really could handle herself with people. Eighteen years of rubbing up against Nicholas’s smoothness had had its effect. Also, as his fame grew, she’d been charmed by the best. The whole world wanted to sit at her dinner table. And so she’d learned, a little, how to charm back. But all that seemed to count for nothing. She’d felt more socially adept in her senior year at Woodward High School than she felt with Judson Fullerton.
“I have a place on East End.”
“Oh,” Jane said. She had to think of something to say. She couldn’t just say oh. “I assumed you lived in Connecticut.”
“I do. In Westport. But I teach at Cornell Medical School one day a week, so I have a studio.”
“What do you teach?”
He looked at her as if she were crazy. “Psychiatry,” he said.
“White wine,” she called. He’d disappeared into his slot of a kitchen. “If you have it.”
It didn’t look as though he had very much. The studio seemed to have been rented furnished, or at least decorat
ed by someone with even less imagination than the person who had fixed up his chrome and leather office. The couch, two small armchairs, and an ottoman were from no particular period, and their inconsequentiality was underscored by their upholstery; they were all covered in the same nubby mud-gold fabric. The room’s two tables, a long rectangle and a small end table with a lamp, were laminated with something too shiny to be wood, although it was dark brown and had a distinct grain. The only other objects in the room were medical and psychiatric journals, which were scattered about with surprising randomness. She leafed through one on the table beside her chair. An advertisement showed a man with a window in his torso, his intestines on view. “‘What do you see, Doctor?’” the ad began. She went on until she came to a page that said “Fracture of the Month” and then put it aside.
“I have a Montrachet,” he announced from the kitchen.
“That will be fine.”
There was a psychiatric journal on the table, but she didn’t want to look at it. There could be an article about agoraphobia that might say something about phobics she didn’t want to know.
Somewhere he’d taken off his jacket and unfastened his collar pin. He came out of the kitchen with two glasses of wine and handed her one. “You’ve stayed off the tranquilizers?” he asked. He sat on the other chair and put his feet up on the ottoman.
“Oh, yes.”
“Cheers.” He lifted his glass. “Well, it went very well. It’s too bad it was a live show.”
“I’m taping it. I have one of those—” Babbling again. She would go on and describe every button of the video cassette recorder. She sipped her wine to camouflage her silence.
He hooked his finger around the knot of his tie, loosened it, pulled it off, and opened the top button of his shirt. He tossed the tie onto the coffee table. She waited for him to get up and fold it flat. He didn’t. “I think after today you’re going to be in great demand. Every talk show is going to want you.”