Motherland

by Amy Sohn

  “It could be sweet to have a baby around again,” Marco said hopefully.

  “Do you have any idea how hard babies are? They wake up every two hours.” She told him about Harry going underwater that morning at Dyer Pond. “That never would have happened if Harry had been the firstborn,” she said. “People watch their first child. The second they ignore. With the first, you get through all the awful stuff because you’re romantic about it. It’s like a first love. The second gives you all of the agita with none of the romance. Tell Todd you’ll consider it in another year. There’s no biological clock.”

  “Maybe you’re right. It doesn’t have to be a no. It can be a maybe.”

  The boy with the hot nanny was getting restless. She took him outside as the mother and father sat there, the baby on the mother’s lap, regarding the menu and saying nothing. Even the parents with help were miserable.

  Rebecca regarded her friend, who had aged ten years since the last time she saw him, the day before, for lunch at the Lighthouse with the kids. Todd was always saddling him with Enrique, working late on his job sites, and if they were going to pick up this other kid, he needed to relax while he could. “Do you guys want to come to the barbecue at the Shanahans’ tonight?” she asked Marco. “It might get your mind off all this.”

  Marco shook his head. “We have all this stuff to get ready for tomorrow.”

  “Come by yourself. Even for a little while.” She put her hand on his. “It’s going to work out. One way or another, it’ll work out.” She didn’t believe what she was saying but thought this was what he needed to hear. He nodded sadly and glanced out at a Sunfish wobbling in the still harbor air.

  Melora

  When the bearded man sat beside Melora Leigh in the first-class cabin of United Airlines Flight 712 from LAX to JFK, she figured he was a midlevel tech guy, the kind who typed on a Dell and wore his cell phone in a holster. He was heavyset but tall and firm-chested—“husky” was the word that came to mind. His graying thinning hair was cropped short, in more of a middle-American-crew-cut way than a Larry Gagosian way. He looked to be in his early fifties. To her this meant totally over the hill. Though forty-one, Melora still saw herself as about twenty-nine, a misconception that was shattered only when she went to a Hollywood party, found herself surrounded by young beautiful women, caught herself in a mirror, and realized with horror that she could be their mother.

  She had been staying at the Sunset Tower Hotel in L.A. for a long weekend while on a rehearsal break from the Broadway revival of Lanford Wilson’s Fifth of July, directed by the sought-after theater director Teddy Lombardo. Melora was playing Gwen Landis, the pill-popping copper heiress—the role originated on Broadway in 1980 by Swoosie Kurtz. Jon Hamm from the television show Mad Men was Ken Talley, the paraplegic gay Vietnam veteran.

  Swoosie’s performance had been imprinted on Melora’s memory since she saw the play on a date with Christian Slater when they were twelve. Initially she’d had reservations about taking the part. No one could out-Swoosie Swoosie. But Melora’s CAA agent, Vanessa Andreadakis, said it could be a chance to put her own interpretation on an iconic role.

  “Isn’t it dangerous to play a role someone else made famous?” Melora had asked.

  “Joe Mantegna didn’t stop Jeremy Piven from doing Speed-the-Plow,” Vanessa had said, though as Melora pointed out, that was not the best example of a Broadway success story.

  So she took the role for two thousand a week—a pittance—reasoning that there were only so many media in which reinvention was possible and that theater was one of them. She felt the troubled but lovable Gwen could help her make light of, and move past, her troubles of the past few years. These included a brief stretch of kleptomania at the Prospect Park Food Coop, leading to a benzodiazepine dependency; a tabloid photograph of her vomiting on the Flatbush Avenue Extension; the loss of a career-making role (Lucy in the feature film Atlantic Yards) to Maggie Gyllenhaal, who went on to win an Oscar for it; her contentious divorce from the Aussie actor and Atlantic Yards writer-director Stuart Ashby; a bitter custody battle over their adopted son, Orion; and the utter box office failure of her latest film, the marital drama Yellow Rosie. Given all that, theater could only be an upswing.

  Yet from the get-go, Fifth of July had seemed cursed, more cursed than Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, which was in rehearsals at the same time, a few blocks away. At the first read-through, Teddy had asked why she was doing a monotone, not understanding that she was underplaying the lines deliberately so as to let Wilson’s text speak for itself. The cast had glared at her as though she were a Hollywood airhead who had never done theater. As the others went on with their lines Melora had an All That Jazz moment, burrowing deep into her own self-loathing and wishing that Dexedrine had not gone out of style.

  There were other issues. Alessandro Nivola, Boerum Hill resident and husband to Emily Mortimer, was playing Gwen’s husband, John Landis, and so far had evinced a chronic lateness problem, which was making it difficult for Melora to build onstage chemistry with him. Jon Hamm was going to be a huge draw, and though Teddy was directing him to play all of Ken’s queeny, laconic lines for the biggest laughs, he was directing Melora to play against her comedic instincts with Gwen, a coke-snorting space cadet and the funniest character in the play. Gwen was the best-written part, drugged out, sexual, uncensored, but also bright and shrewd.

  Melora had done theater well before Fifth of July, which was why she was dismayed that her cast-mates didn’t seem to respect her. Though she had won her first Oscar at nine for playing Al Pacino’s daughter in Paul Schrader’s 1977 drama The Main Line, she had come back to the off-Broadway and Broadway stage a dozen times since, playing Helen Keller in The Miracle Worker, Frankie in A Member of the Wedding, Anne in The Diary of Anne Frank, Rhonda in Ted Tally’s Hooters, and Cherie in Bus Stop. Reviews of those performances had been kind to solid; when she was fourteen, Frank Rich had called her portrayal of Frankie “proof that Ms. Leigh is gifted in many media.”

  She was beginning to lose hope that Fifth of July could garner her the critical respect that had eluded her since the travesty of Yellow Rosie, the fourth original feature by indie director Adam Epstein, whose name was often mentioned in the same breath as Wes Anderson’s and Paul Thomas Anderson’s. When she wrapped Yellow Rosie a year and a half before, she was convinced that her performance as Rosie, the tranquilizer-addicted borderline-personality-disorder wife of a Texas oilman (Viggo Mortensen), would garner her an Oscar nom. It would be her Blind Side, at last cementing her as one of the top fortysomething actresses in America, right up there with Nicole, Julia, and Sandy. But from the day it was released, nothing went right. The marketing campaign had been nil, and then Paramount Vantage chose to release it the same week as Sherlock Holmes as counterprogramming—without realizing that women liked Robert Downey, Jr., and Jude Law.

  Though reviewers had called her performance “stirring,” “mature,” and “focused,” and A. O. Scott put her on “Should Be Nominated,” no one saw it. She had hopes that it would become a My Big Fat Greek Wedding, a slow-building success, but that never happened. It grossed only $3 million on a $25 million budget, and Adam Epstein had long ago stopped returning her calls. The movie did so poorly that it was pointed to as one of the main reasons for a recent round of layoffs at Vantage.

  So now she was doing a play. She hadn’t bonded with any of the cast members and begged off when they all went to Angus McIndoe or Joe Allen after rehearsal. She spent most nights alone in her condo at Palazzo Chupi with her live-in nanny, Suzette, and Orion, until Stuart whisked him off for a summer vacation. When she did go out, it was to quiet restaurants with her pop-star friend Cassie Trainor.

  Her days were boring without being fulfilling, the worst combination, and yet her boredom was unaccompanied by calm. She could remember the release she felt after grabbing a man’s wallet at the Prospect Park Food Coop and slipping it into her handbag. Since then there had been only a persistent sen
se of agitation.

  Melora’s seat-mate was opening a New York Times. If he was reading the Times, he was a New Yorker. Maybe he was a finance guy coming back from some meetings designed to help him break into film producing.

  She stared out the window at the ground crew. She’d once had a Ugandan colonic hygienist who told her his fascination with colon health began after he got a ground-crew job at JFK and ate fast food late at night after his shift. The food was so bad that within a few months he was moving his bowels only once a week. In pain and not yet aware of the diet/colonic health continuum, he had stopped in a health food store in his Queens neighborhood and discovered a book on the colon. It became his bible. He began to research the importance of bowel function to wellness and a few years later left the ground-crew world to become a professional ass irrigator. Ever since she’d heard the story, she could not look at airport workers without worrying about their anuses.

  The flight attendant, a tall, angular African-American woman, was coming up the aisle. “Good evening, Mr. Hiss,” she said to the bearded man. “Orange juice, sparkling water, or champagne?”

  Mr. Hiss. It sounded like someone who wanted to kill you. Like the beginning of a dirty limerick. There was an old fellow named Hiss / Who stood up to take a piss . . .

  “Champagne,” he said. His voice was soft and melodious, like a voiceover on a gourmet ice cream commercial.

  He and the flight attendant bantered about the weather in Los Angeles and what was expected in New York. He spoke with a level of confidence not on a par with his homely appearance. He flipped through his paper and sipped his champagne slowly. Melora ordered a mimosa, reasoning that the antioxidants in the orange juice would counter the toxins in the champagne. She stared down at the flute and felt self-conscious suddenly for ordering something so frivolous.

  “I got it,” the man said, putting down his newspaper and snapping his fingers at her. “Million Dollar Baby.”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t—”

  “I loved it. That boxing gym was so real, and when you threw the punches, it wasn’t fake, like in other movies. But I’ll see anything Clint does. The one about Detroit with the Hmong? The man just keeps on growing.”

  In the eighties this kind of thing used to happen to Melora frequently—a businessman on a plane, some shmo on his way to Hong Kong—would gawk at her openly only to confuse her with Nancy Travis. But it hadn’t happened recently. This was proof that her career was over. She had gone from instantly recognizable to mistaken for someone more famous. Melora despised Hilary Swank and had since Boys Don’t Cry, in part because she herself had been in the final round for the role. She didn’t like the shape of Hilary’s teeth and felt her work called too much attention to itself.

  “Your hair’s blonder,” said this Mr. Hiss, “but you can’t fool me.”

  “Wrong person,” she said, terse.

  The man smiled a strange, slow-creeping smile, and she realized he had been taking her for a ride. He had known all along who she was and had baited her. “You’re offended,” he said. “Why is that?”

  “I’m not offended.”

  “You don’t like her work, but you don’t want to admit it. For an Oscar winner, you’re a terrible liar.” So he had known exactly who she was. “You’re too cautious. Hollywood is too fucking sterile these days.”

  “What do you mean, ‘sterile’?”

  “No one has feuds. Whatever happened to those Hollywood feuds? Steve McQueen and Bob Evans. Shirley MacLaine and Debbie Reynolds. Even the producers don’t fight anymore. Kabbalah and yoga have made everyone too nice. Julia Roberts is a Hindu. A Hindu!”

  “I’m not nice.”

  “Yes, you are,” he said. “You wish you weren’t. You are very nice and very careful. The perfect celebrity.” He said this as though it were the ugliest thing you could say.

  This was getting uncomfortable. As irritated as she was with the man for taking the license of striking up a conversation with her, she blamed herself for being in this situation. If she hadn’t married Stuart, she would have twice as much money, and she wouldn’t have to fly commercial. Her divorce settlement had given Stuart $2 million of the profit from the Prospect Park West mansion, which they had sold to a Google couple for $8.5 million. She also agreed to give him half of their joint stock holdings. Melora was terrified that she would burn through what remained of her money and be unable to work again to replenish it. She had frequent visions of herself flying coach, which she had not done in decades.

  Mr. Hiss leaned over suddenly. She smelled something raw on his breath. She felt that if he opened his mouth, a small green monster would fly out, like on a Lysol commercial. “Did you hear the story about the woman whose husband was weird,” he said, “and she sent him to the shrink?”

  “Is this a joke?”

  “No. Friend of a friend. True story.” He licked his lips as though he were at Campanile, regaling dozens. “So he goes to the shrink and says, ‘My wife thinks I’m weird, but I don’t think I am. Do you? She says I do odd things, these verbal and facial tics, and that it makes people uncomfortable.’ And as he’s talking, the shrink notices that he does do weird things.”

  Mr. Hiss’s black eyes darted. He looked at her as though she were a pair of white cotton panties under a teenage girl’s skirt.

  “So the shrink says to the man, ‘I think your wife is right. You do do strange things, and I’m going to tape you so you can see for yourself.’ He records the man’s session and shows him the video, and the man says, ‘Oh my God! I am weird! I never knew it. Thank you, Doctor!’ He goes home and thanks his wife for suggesting that he get help. She feels glad he took her good advice.

  “Well, he keeps going to the shrink, and the shrink keeps taping him, and eventually, he learns not to do his tics. He gets this newfound self-esteem because people no longer act uncomfortable around him. Instead of crossing the room to get away when he comes in, they’re drawn to him. In fact, they like him even more because they remember the shlub he used to be. Eventually, he decides that he’s not happy in his marriage, and he asks his wife for a divorce.”

  She waited for him to go on, but he didn’t say anything else. Because she was used to seeing everything in terms of how it affected her, she was certain that he had told her the story to communicate something about her own divorce.

  The flight attendant had gathered the cups and was beginning the safety demonstration. There was something pornographic about these performances, the boredom of the performers, the S/M-like buckles. Mr. Hiss was quiet until it was finished, and then he belted himself in and put his seat upright. As the attendants did the final cabin check, he went on, “So the man and the woman split up, and a couple years go by and she throws a party. Everyone’s drinking too much, and she’s saying bad things about him, mocking him, and she gets on the subject of a toast he made at their wedding, some silly and bad toast. She says she’s going to show her wedding video, and she thinks she finds it, but when she pops in the tape, it turns out to be from the shrink. In it her now-ex-husband is practicing how to be normal. He’s saying things like ‘It’s a pleasure to meet you’ and ‘I’m so glad I could make it,’ and the therapist is coaching him. The wife had never seen it. She pretends she thinks it’s funny, and everyone at the party sits there watching, laughing at her ex-husband’s quirks. Except her. She starts to cry because she realizes that she misses him no matter how strange he was.”

  “So a woman should never tell her man to go to therapy?” Melora asked.

  “Maybe. Maybe the best thing a woman can do, if she wants to keep her husband, is deny him the privilege of knowing his failings.”

  Mr. Hiss reminded her a little of her former therapist, Dr. Michael Levine. But the story felt more accessible than the Buddhist koans Michael Levine used to tell, the cryptic ones where she would say, “Tell me what it means!” and he would shake his head no like a Jewish Buddhist Yoda.

  Melora decided that Mr. Hiss’s story did not con
tain some cosmic truth but was a come-on, a meandering pickup. He was one of those neurolinguistic programming guys, and this was a well-tested anecdote designed to make women feel a connection to him that wasn’t there. It worked well as a come-on because you could look at it a lot of different ways and because it involved several topics that women found intriguing: abandonment, humiliation, and divorce.

  “Who are you?” she asked him.

  “What do you mean, who am I?”

  “What do you do for a living?”

  “A friend of mine, a young girl in L.A., was on the LifeCycle at her gym,” he said. “A man got on the next machine. He said, ‘What do you do?’ She said, ‘I’m a milkmaid,’ and he said, ‘I’m a producer!’ ”

  “Are you a producer?” Melora asked. He laughed. She added, “Where do you live?”

  “New York.”

  His large stomach strained against his seemingly expensive cornflower-blue button-down shirt. She felt that if she punched it, her hand would hurt. Ten years ago, she had met the comedian Sarah Silverman at a party in Bel Air. They were tipsy and wound up confiding about ex-boyfriends. Melora asked if she had a type, and Sarah said, “Fat guys, because they try so hard and they’ve learned a lot from porn.” Melora wondered if Mr. Hiss would try hard. She imagined that if he were on top of her, it would be hard to breathe. She pictured his enormous Jewish nose hitting her in the dark.

  “Come on,” she said. “What do you do?”

  “I paint,” he said with a sigh.

  “Walls?”

  “No, not walls. Canvases.”

  This excited her. He was an artist. He had a pedigree. Abruptly, she was less bothered by his balding pattern. “Are you famous?”

  “I used to be.”

  Melora’s interior decorator had selected all of her artwork in SoHo and in Park Slope and now in the condo in WeWeVill, West of the West Village. She had some Serras, some Salles, some Schnabel prints, a few Elizabeth Peytons, and a few early John Currin drawings, but she found it difficult to form an opinion about any of them. They were what the decorator thought would be impressive. She knew when she liked a play or a movie, but art was more complicated.