by Parker Posey
Nora told me to freeze my eggs at lunch at Barney’s the last time I saw her, and I stood up and walked to the kitchen. She mentioned then how she got her hair blown out twice a week and that one day I would have to get work done. People in my business look at you like you don’t care enough to wash your face if you don’t “do” something. Truth is, people have great skin who have never washed their face; who cares? No one. So, full circle, I got this ultrasound thing on my face and neck and it’s so painful and stupidly expensive but I gave birth to new collagen. I would need to keep this going for my entire career and it cost as much as my monthly maintenance and mortgage combined in my old apartment on lower Fifth Avenue, the neighborhood that’s called the “Gold Coast,” and not affectionately. I never heard anyone call it that until I left.
I didn’t want to do a CSI: Neverland so I needed to sell my apartment. I used myself in the photo for the ad. “Live in the Gilded Age,” it said, and I held Mary-Louise Parker’s book, Dear Mr. You, in my lap pretending to read. This was a decision on my part that in the real estate world was considered gauche but I knew times had changed and this new gilded age was about famous people, celebrities. I ignored my celebrity as much as I could but I wasn’t going to now.
The apartment felt more like a hotel suite than a home, anyway. I wasn’t sad to leave, only to have to move. There were a hundred something units in the whole building so for me, it was Eloise at the Plaza—never really a home. Work was my home and I’d spent the last seven years or so living in a money drain. When I wasn’t worrying, I brushed off stress with delusion, denial, and faith. I liked the gilded apartment though. Nadim (the previous owner) was into remodeling, especially the trim and molding, to get it to resemble what it was originally. I liked the apartment not filled and thinking about the history: Emily Post, who lived around the corner, as well as Edith Wharton and Mark Twain, whose apartments I’d pass every time I walked down Tenth Street. Nadim was a class act and had a vintage bicycle from the forties leaned against the wall when the apartment was staged for sale. He took me out to dinner and left the bicycle as a gift. I ended up giving the bicycle to someone who fell in love with it—I don’t remember who it was but I’d been thrown in the air by a bike messenger the last time I Rollerbladed, so my time of feeling safe on wheels had ended.
My friend Rob Roth was stuck in the middle of a move, too. We’d met a decade before. He’d directed a show at Abrons Arts Center, on the Lower East Side, where the singer Theo Kogan performed with a projected image over herself as she stood still on a volcano made of TVs that were all turned to static. It had an eerie effect, as she sang songs with the spirit of herself in front of her, lip-syncing. Rob wasn’t actually moving apartments but the apartments were being moved around him as he was possibly, or probably, being renovicted by his landlord, a slimeball who is now in jail and if you saw a picture of him you’d say, “Rat landlord”; he was that archetypal. The building was being renovated to up the rent for the mostly younger people whose parents foot the bill, and most everyone moved out because the remodeling drove them crazy or they’d gotten bought out. The noise was one thing and the construction debris floating everywhere was another. It’s hard to have a good day when your front door is covered in plastic, like a biological warfare zone or something out of a Tarkovsky film, something that screams “I’m contaminated!” when you arrive at the door. It was Hispanic families and artists who stood their ground and were able to hold on to their rent-stabilized apartments—about ten out of sixty tenants remained.
The remaining tenants would watch construction workers take away the structural beams outside their windows and wonder if the work being done would cave in their entire building. The pipes that flooded Rob’s bathroom had him feeling gaslit—was it done on purpose or were the workers simply too inept to repair the pipes above him when they’d turn on the water main downstairs? Did the rat-man landlord turn it on himself or was there just a real rat who needed a bath? Rats are smart and they’re dirty. Or, if you’re thinking positive, was it all just a way to get close to his neighbors, who were all going through the same thing?
The mantel of the fake fireplace on the ground floor, which had served as a junk store and resembled Christmas all year long, had held books that had been left by neighbors, along with old costumes and a pair of buffalo horns that Rob took for his place. Now they’d demolished that and there was nothing to leave the neighbors, so say bye-bye to your found treasures and that sweet reciprocity. It’s easier to throw it in the dumpster directly outside, anyway. Who cares? No one. This pissed both of us off and we called it evil. Our found pieces of furniture on the sidewalks of the city were some of our most cherished possessions because they had meaning.
Rob’s dad was a policeman in the seventies in the Bronx, which makes me think of that movie Dog Day Afternoon. Rob’s a performance artist and dresses like a wolf and sings songs by the Smiths at cabarets and theaters—and even at weddings. The wolf’s name is Craig and he’s pretty starved but likes to sing. Craig is Rob’s protest, like Pacino’s “Attica! Attica!” when he leaves that bank. The protest of the disenfranchised, of not only prisoners but gays and artists and anyone left in the margins the city had neglected—like the people without money.
It takes about an hour for Rob’s transformation because he has to glue fur to his face as well as put on fake nails. We had some fun moments of inspiration where we talked about making short films in the building but it was better left as inspiration. Why give your head more apocalyptic images to fit into your dreams? We both already had dust up our noses. “And in the darkened underpass, I thought, oh God my chance has come at last . . .” “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out” by the Smiths is one of the best songs ever. Not appropriate for a plane ride but . . .
So I moved out of the Gold Coast to rent my friends Mindy and Tony’s apartment in the West Village. They had two kids, Billy and Emma, who were four and six at the time, and since the town house they were in belonged to Tony’s mom, Marcia, it was okay for them to put a spiral staircase in the corner and make a pop-up on the roof, as their master bedroom. They were busting out of the place and it was an obstacle course of toys and sippy cups and they could afford to move so they did. But they didn’t want Marcia to be alone and couldn’t think of anyone besides me that she could tolerate having around.
Marcia is a born-and-bred West Village New Yorker. She’s Jewish and looks like Woody Allen’s twin sister; she’s just as diminutive in size and wears loose khakis and starched white shirts and glasses. She doesn’t care for his movies and couldn’t care less about his personal life (she’s from the none-of-my-business generation), and was “a moldy fig” in her teen years—that’s what a group of particular jazz enthusiasts called themselves in Manhattan at that time; they liked Dixieland jazz, pure jazz, not the Duke Ellington stuff. Marcia has distinct tastes, is sharp as a tack, and lives a full life—betting on the horses during the day, stopping at her favorite butcher (Florence Meat Market), going to “the Stupid Market” (what she calls the local grocery store), taking her private yoga class (as a cigarette burns in an ashtray). She loves a good drink, good movies, PBS, opera, and ballet and admittedly has no sense for decorating. She is an excellent cook and tells wonderful stories, even when they veer toward the medical—colonoscopies, her gynecologist, and her removed breast. I adore her.
We had a fun time on the Cape after her day of screaming at the television to cheer the horses and going outside to read or stare at the sailboats—“There’s the view,” she’d say in a way that made us both laugh. At night, she’d pass me the pint of coffee-flavored Häagen-Dazs, saying, “I know you want another bite, Parker Posey.” We like the same treats, or “goodies,” like Australian black licorice, turtles, chocolate almond bark—and anything coffee. Turtles are like Millionaires, chocolate, caramel, and pecans.
I’d move in easily as a surrogate family member and tenant, or so I thought and hoped. Mindy
had moved into my rent-controlled place in Chelsea in the early 2000s, so it was an even trade in my book. There’d have to be work done so I hired an architect, as the work would have to be done by a professional—I’d heard about the mouse problem over the years. “Mouse problem” sounds so much better than “infestation,” doesn’t it? The kitchen was cockamamie, with the fridge door opening the wrong way toward the enormous butcher-block island that made me think of a gurney. Yes, take me away. Tony was a Deadhead and even had his own restaurant in Seattle in the nineties—his stories could fill a podcast.
I broke the wall in the kids’ room to have more of an open loft and knocked out a closet in the middle of the apartment to get sunlight from both sides of the building. The man who came to repair the floors kept singing “Under the Boardwalk,” and when I joined in, it got out of hand. He cornered me singing this song, as I was standing on the ledge of a window trying to pull the old blinds hardware off that had been there since the sixties. I remember one insane moment of trying to leave the apartment, pulling myself away as he was trying to grab my hands to dance, and I was instead snapping my fingers and harmonizing so loudly and off-key thinking I could stop this but enjoyed it sort of—opening the door to leave, singing “Oh Mandy. Well, you came and you gave without taking . . .” He liked the songs heard in subway stations—the songs that have a hard time leaving your head.
I’d sing these subway songs when Rob and I made many trips to Ikea and drive us both crazy. We called Ikea the purgatory of home improvement because what you’d purchased guaranteed many returns, like atonement. My entire kitchen came from there. It was around my fifth or sixth trip and an employee there who’d seen me days before said, “I never want to see you again!” when I left, and I shouted, “Me neither!” and skated my cart out of there. I saw her the next day and when she saw me coming, shouted, “I thought I said I never wanted to see you again!” and I told her I was there to make up.
The renovations seemed simple enough at the outset but were fraught with obstacles, too boring for me to go into or even to want to remember. My architect, Michael, was baffled by all the legalese stuff, permits or whatever drama or loopholes were thrown our way—it felt like I paid him mostly to handle me. I’d met another architect recently who, when I asked what his job was like, said, “It’s mainly getting the wives to do what the husbands want.” Ha ha ha ha, so funny.
A director I’d worked with, James, let me stay in the town house he’d bought as an investment, which was conveniently close to Marcia’s. It was stark and dark in there but rich and hazy where an oil painting of a stormy mythical English countryside hung in the dark kitchen. The bathroom downstairs was tiny and painted dark teal and lacquered. The toilet flusher was a small brass button on the wall that was difficult to see from the light of the brass-flapped sconces that framed the mirror. I’d press the button thinking I was detonating a bomb or opening an escape hatch, or hoping the wall would move and get me to Narnia. It didn’t, but the gray-tinted mirror granted a dark ageless glow.
The master bathroom had a seventies Hollywood Regency vibe to it and reminded me of The Shining, mirrors everywhere and octagonal marble tiles, and a bathtub so big I’d have to brace myself with one arm to shave my legs. I pictured myself going down the drain.
I’d make my way to Marcia’s in the mornings to oversee the work once it had started and called Rob to share that I was walking in my slippers down the sidewalk. He’d tell me how a jar fell on his head as he sat on the floor putting on his face fur for Craig. The gash on his head was maybe a sign to stop performing and as he tormented himself over it, I’d encourage him by saying, “No, you were just in character. What do you expect as Craig? He’s a mess but you’re not.”
We were both messes and we’d catch each other’s heads like they were lids flying off a full-speed blender. We were in tandem, though. “Moving is one of the top three most stressful things you can do,” everyone kept telling me, and when you hear that from friends who don’t have time to help, it rings even more true. “Moving is one of the top three most stressful things you can do. It’s up there with death and divorce,” I’d hear over and over again. Moving is both death and divorce: the time you spent in that home dies and you divorce most of your belongings.
Friends would pop by to escort me and the belongings that survived the divorce and help push one of those wheeled carts through Washington Square Park to Marcia’s. I wanted to keep organized and didn’t want to unpack a bunch of cardboard boxes that would leave me feeling both empty and overwhelmed, so I made several trips to unload things by hand. Marcia had gone to Cape Cod and we were waiting for permits for demolition to start and I arranged my things nicely in Tony’s old room—“my prince,” as Marcia refers to him, always touching her hand to her heart whenever she says his name. “The renovations will be done when Marcia comes back in October,” Mindy, Tony, and I were chanting like a mantra. Tony had terrible stomach problems that were more than just lactose intolerance and was getting it all checked out—moving is emotional.
I decided to leave for just ten days to do Kogonada’s movie Columbus with John Cho and Haley Lu Richardson. Kogonada, with his mononymous name, had written about film in magazines like Filmmaker and I’d seen his video essays on Vimeo, which were so beautiful they took my breath away—they were edited composites of directors he admired, like Ozu and Kubrick, Soderbergh and Linklater—seen through his artful eye and understanding of cinema. He was so inspired by the mecca of modern architecture in Columbus, Indiana, that he’d based the film there. I’d never been, or at least not that I remembered, and kept calling it Illinois. The demolition (the noise) in the new place would start while I was away, and I decided that if the cost of the moving trucks matched what I’d get paid for the part, I’d consider it an equal trade; it did, so I did it. Situations had to have balance, had to be just, or I may have cracked. So when the part came, I looked at it as meaningful help.
I’d play Eleanor, an architect and writer who was assisting her mentor, Jae Yong Lee, while he was giving a lecture in Columbus. She’d spent her early twenties studying with him in Seoul and lived with his family. Kogonada said she was the bridge or in-between to two men: a daughter or creative mistress to Jae Yong Lee, and for his son Jin, his first love (who wasn’t his mother) and sister figure. The different kinds of love we have for each other branch out to affect the lives of everyone around us. Trees don’t compete for sunlight, like we learned at school, or fight to get taller—they collaborate and exist harmoniously naturally—that’s how they grow.
In the film, within the frame, Kogonada placed architecture as if it were a character. Midcentury architecture had so much promise and optimism—the placement of buildings on the ground in relation to nature and to the space already held in the surrounding environment: the lines of symmetry drawing out vertically and horizontally into space. The harmony becomes alive when you participate, when you can stand inside the space and feel it. Haley Lu’s character, Casey, would awaken Jin to those thoughts again. Casey represented Eleanor twenty years ago, before her marital responsibilities and the anguish that comes with maturity.
* * *
Within the story of the film and the characters’ relationships, Kogonada wanted to explore what he called “the burden of absence that children carry in regards to their parents.” The first scene takes place at the famous modernist-masterpiece home of J. Irwin Miller and Xenia Simons Miller, built by Eero Saarinen with interiors designed by Alexander Girard and Dan Kiley—known as the Miller House and Garden. The Miller family was responsible for commissioning the best architects in the world at this time and paying contractors to build their designs—it was their philanthropy as well as the Cummins Engine Company that stamped this small town of forty-five thousand people with over fifty modernist buildings.
The first shot was at the Miller House and Garden, where I run to greet my mentor Jae Yong Lee as he is taking in the view of the m
assive east lawn framed with weeping beech trees. It was raining that day and foreshadowed the sadness to come. The next scene, I’d be on the phone with my husband and Jae Yong Lee would collapse. I would get to drop my umbrella and run to him, admitting him into the hospital. I’d get in touch with Jin to have him fly to Columbus, where we’d sit at a bar while I tried to temper his resentments toward his father. Why be there for his dad when his dad was never there for him? We hadn’t seen each other in over a decade and our relationship was still like family—I’d guide him like an all-loving mother to stay, like a sister who’s “always right.” “He’s your father, Jin.” I’d get to express my own grief and frustration with my dad’s prostate cancer of over twenty years, which was getting worse now. His bones were brittle and a tumor was bumping a screw from his hip operation. His charm had pushed its edge into being erratically demanding and projections too strong for me to break through. I’d be told I wasn’t listening to him and “I don’t think you understand.” My twin brother and I were fourteen again in his eyes and our issues with Dad would have to be resolved internally—the burden of absence active in both of us and his situation demanding lightness and humor. He’d always been a wonderful narcissist and a star patient to his doctors at Sloan Kettering. One got so worked up that she finally shouted at him, “You use your cancer to get attention!” My dad thought this was hysterical, in the way that funny things are true, and savored the exra attention. My mom, relaying the story, adorned in her Ann Taylor and gold chains, rolled her eyes and shrugged a “What’re you gonna do?” How many more seats in the audience need to be filled? My brother was carrying so much of the burden down south and reaching his limit with the demands placed on him. He and his wife have three kids, and when Dad would call at seven thirty in the morning with a craving for an Egg McMuffin, it didn’t bode well. I was concerned for his health, both of theirs, all of theirs—body, mind, and spirit. Making a scotch for Dad when he was on chemo was painful. I would place my father in the hospital and bring him flowers and hug my brother.