Motherland

by Amy Sohn

  In the morning, Orion had started first grade at Saint Ann’s. She had taken him, with Suzette, armed with wraparound sunglasses and a dark red lipstick that made her look cheerier than she felt. She hated the first day of school, the crazy scene of civilians, and always felt that they were staring. She had stayed in the classroom with Suzette for a compulsory twenty minutes, then been relieved when she got back into the Highlander to go to rehearsal.

  “What did you two do after school today?” Melora asked Orion brightly.

  He shrugged and shoveled down food with a bamboo fork. Though Suzette wasn’t a great cook, she was passable. She tended to make Orion the same things over and over, but she had a master’s in early childhood education and had said children were homeostatic, which meant they figured out how to get the nutrition they needed. “We went to that new playground by the Seaport,” Suzette said.

  “What new playground?”

  “Imagination. The David Rockwell. There are these free-standing pieces kids can play with. Orion loved it.”

  “That’s great! I’m so glad.” Melora struggled with how to talk to a six-year-old. She often felt that her tone with him was one you would use with a two-year-old. His own behavior swung wildly from baby to sullen teen. He would say things like “I know!” in a weary teenage voice but cry for fifteen minutes if he skinned his knee.

  “You should come with us one day,” Suzette said. “It’s built around the notion of free play.”

  “It’s always free to play.”

  “No, ‘free play’ means unrestricted to foster creativity.”

  “Right.”

  “You should spend a little time with him,” Suzette said softly. “He was just saying the other day that you never give him baths anymore.”

  “Mommy doesn’t like to get wet,” Orion said. “She yells at me. She calls me a terrist.”

  “A terrorist?” Suzette asked in shock. Melora knew she had called him that, but when? She couldn’t remember the last time she’d given him a bath alone.

  Melora laughed loudly. “I’ve always wanted to write a book about young children. Called You Don’t Negotiate with a Terrorist.” Suzette didn’t seem to think it was funny. Melora was relieved to hear the house phone ringing. She slipped into the bedroom and answered. It was her friend Cassie Trainor, the perpetually twenty-seven-year-old singer-songwriter sensation. Since Cassie’s divorce from the comedian David Keller, she had been partying a lot and frequently enlisted Melora to be her partner in crime. Melora didn’t care for Cassie’s circle: the young artists, DJs, and actors. They dressed like hobos and stared at their cell phones. Sometimes they were talking to their parents. It was impossible to imagine the crowd at Max’s Kansas City in 1970 calling their parents. There would have been no pop art, no punk, no new wave, if youth then had been like the youth today.

  “So has he called?” Cassie asked.

  “He’s not going to.”

  “He’s got to have a cell. I totally stalked David. We met at that Balenciaga party, and I had my publicist get his number.”

  “Look where that ended up,” Melora said.

  “There was a lot of love there. My only regret is that I wasn’t more Buddhist about the separation, but I didn’t have that self-awareness. It’s something Michael’s been helping me with.”

  After Melora had terminated with her Buddhist therapist, Dr. Michael Levine, who she felt had been inattentive during her split, Cassie had asked her for a shrink recommendation. Feeling generous and unattached, Melora had recommended Michael. Now Cassie raved constantly about how great he was. It killed her that Cassie was getting excellent therapy when her own had been mediocre. It was like dumping a guy for being a bad lover and then learning someone else thought he was fabulous in bed. Either the person was lying or the problem was you.

  “Do you want to come out tonight?” Cassie asked. “I got invited to the Lambs Club. They just opened. It’s a private party to get influencers excited about their menu. All the Gossip Girls are going to be there, and Ryan and Scarlett, and this very cute comedian named Mayer Mayerson who I met at Zach Galifianakis’s loft last week.”

  “I’m too old to be a wingman,” Melora said.

  “No. No! I want to see you, too!”

  “I’m not in a good state to go out right now.”

  As Melora hung up with Cassie, she realized she was hungry. All day she’d taken in only a probiotic yogurt shake, some crackers, and sauvignon blanc. It wouldn’t be the worst thing to eat in the company of other humans. She had heard a bit about the Lambs Club, the restaurant inside the Chatwal Hotel in the theater district. It had already been written up in the Times and New York. It seemed the sceney kind of place that once would have appealed to her. She texted Piotr, “I’m going out,” and dialed Cassie.

  The second-floor bar was crowded when she arrived, but Cassie wasn’t there yet. She spotted Scarlett and Ryan; Padma Lakshmi and a gorgeous Asian girlfriend; a guy who was one of the minor players on Mad Men. Two of the Gossip Girls, whose names she didn’t know. The decor was red and gold. Lights in the shape of the Empire State Building hung over the red glass bar. Melora wasn’t used to going places alone and now felt that she had made a terrible mistake by not picking up Cassie on the way. She didn’t like people and had been afflicted by social anxiety disorder since her childhood. People who thought all actors were extroverts were wrong; she wasn’t, and never had been. Now, because she was famous, if she went somewhere and didn’t talk to anyone, people assumed she was a bitch.

  She found a seat in the back at an empty table, and ordered a martini. Waiters were circulating with hors d’oeuvres, small samplings of the items on Geoffrey Zakarian’s menu. She grabbed fingerling potatoes, lamb loin, ricotta tortellini, a cup of gazpacho, some oysters. Cassie arrived soon after Melora’s drink. Six feet tall with pale skin, Cassie was as beautiful now as she’d been at twenty, when her debut album, Stick Your Finger Down My Throat, went platinum. Though Melora had aged well thanks to Botox, implants, and thigh lipo, she often felt that she was swimming upstream. The difference between forty-one and twenty-seven was how hard you had to work to maintain.

  “I don’t think Mayer’s here yet,” Cassie said, plopping down opposite her in the red leather chair. “Did you see a short guy in a fedora? He always wears a fedora. He’s very Adrien Brody circa The Pianist.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  Melora sipped her martini quickly as Cassie craned her neck to see if Mayer Mayerson had arrived. She went on about his upcoming appearance on 30 Rock, playing an irate comedian.

  “Oh my God, he’s here,” she said.

  “Where?” Melora asked.

  Cassie jerked her head violently like an epileptic. “Right there. Standing by the bar.” She went over. The guy was five-two and Woody Allenesque, with glasses to match. Cassie towered over him. He wore an undershirt and jeans and a small fedora. Cassie ushered him to the table. “This is Mayer Mayerson,” she said.

  “Is that your real name?” Melora asked.

  “Why?”

  “It’s very Semitic-sounding. When I was starting out as an actress, everyone changed their names to help their careers.”

  “When? In, like, the sixties?”

  “Seventies,” she said with a sigh.

  “It’s not like that anymore,” he said. “Today it’s cool to be ethnic. Seinfeld, Rogen, Segel. My real name is Michael Marsden. My family changed it from Mayerson to Marsden at Ellis Island. I started out doing comedy under my real name, but an agent told me to make it more Jewish. I’ve booked twice as many gigs since then.”

  “Isn’t he hilarious?” Cassie said. “You never know when he’s kidding.” She was a brilliant songwriter and wise beyond her years, but she was acting like a schoolgirl. Melora found her enthusiasm for him distressing.

  But Melora herself was no different. What was she doing with Ray, Googling him obsessively and jumping at her cell phone? And she had no excuse. She was far too old to
be so obsessive about a man. She didn’t need men. The only good thing about her life was that there was no man in it, and now she was thinking all the time about a crazy artist who had fingered her on a plane.

  The first martini had gone down so well that she ordered a second. A twentysomething girl came up to the table and kissed Mayer on both cheeks. She was bony, with stringy shoulder-length brown hair. She reminded Melora of an actress she had seen in a production of Sam Shepard’s The Tooth of Crime. She wore ripped tights and a cropped rabbit-fur vest with bare arms. “This place is so surface,” the girl said, flopping down in a seat.

  “I know what you mean,” said Mayer.

  “All of New York is surface,” Cassie said.

  “No, but this place is particularly so.”

  Cassie looked nervous, like she was afraid to keep up, even though she was more attractive, more famous, and richer. “So, um, how do you guys know each other, Mayer?” she asked.

  “He came to this party I throw in Chinatown,” the girl said.

  “Lulu works for a street-theater collective that throws parties in weird spaces. They rent out these big lofts and decorate them. People pay money to come.”

  “I’m a big fan of your early work,” Lulu told Melora. She laughed at the girl’s obnoxiousness. “I heard you’re doing theater now. Why?”

  “Because I have nothing to lose.”

  “You used to live in Brooklyn, right?” Lulu asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Why’d you leave?”

  “My house was like the Scooby mansion. I could never feel safe there. Maybe if I’d lived in a different house, I would have liked it more.”

  “Ven di bobe volt gehat beytsim volt zi geven a zayde.”

  “What does that mean?” Cassie asked.

  “ ‘If my grandma had balls, she’d be my grandpa,’ ” Lulu said.

  “What language is that?”

  “Yiddish.”

  “How do you know Yiddish?” Melora asked.

  “I’m dating a Lubavitcher. I met him at Franklin Park, this bar in Crown Heights. They can drink whiskey but not wine or beer. I call him my inglorious bast-Yid. He calls me his meydel mit a vayndel. ‘Ponytailed nymphet.’ How hot is that?”

  “How can he date you if he’s Hasidic?” Melora asked.

  “He’s on his way out of the community. I’m helping him.” She stood up. “I gotta go. I have to be someplace in Gowanus.”

  “I should be going, too,” Melora said. Cassie started to protest, but then Mayer leaned in and whispered something to her, and she laughed erotically, her face darkening. Melora was relieved to be able to slip out.

  She went down the stairs to the lobby, Lulu in step with her. Melora had texted Piotr and saw the Highlander coming up the block. “You have a driver?” Lulu asked.

  “Apparently.”

  “That’s why it’s good to show your tits in movies. One day you have enough money for a chauffeur.”

  Melora put out her hand. “It was nice meeting you.”

  “You wanna come with me?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Glassphemy! Impossible to describe. Once you witness it, you’ll be forever altered.”

  “It doesn’t sound very transparent,” Melora said. Lulu snorted. “Anyway, I have to get up for rehearsal tomorrow.”

  “Just come for an hour. I’m supposed to be there in like fifteen minutes, and the G is a disaster. Please don’t make me take the G.”

  “You want me to come just because I have a car?”

  “No, I want you to come because you seem to have pent-up anger, and everyone who goes to Glassphemy! winds up feeling less angry.”

  Melora thought for a second and then decided it could be educational, like research. There was something appealing about this girl, though she couldn’t put her finger on what it was. She was impulsive and weird and didn’t seem to care what anyone thought of her. It was a kind of cool that wasn’t manufactured.

  A few minutes later, they were on the West Side Highway, speeding toward the Brooklyn Bridge. “What did you mean when you said that place was surface?” Melora asked.

  “It’s a manufactured experience. I don’t even know why I went. Sometimes I get sad about all the money in the city these days. It’s colonized.”

  “I’m against gentrification,” Melora said, “until it reaches the point where it improves things for me personally. Like when Gourmet Garage came to SoHo.”

  Lulu was squinting at Melora’s breasts. “Are those real?”

  “What do you think?”

  “I can’t tell.”

  “I waited to do them until the nineties. I wanted them to look natural. In the eighties it was all 500 cc’s. Now the most commonly requested size is 325. These are 350.”

  “Can I see them?”

  Melora hesitated, eying Piotr in the rearview mirror. As always, his eyes were on the road. She lifted her shirt and flashed her tits for Lulu. No bra. The great thing about fake tits was that bras were optional. What was getting into her?

  “Nice!” Lulu cried.

  The martinis had caught up with Melora. The lights of the city rushed past, sparkling and beautiful, like candy. Lulu asked her a lot of questions and she wound up telling her about her bad divorce, and working with Al Pacino when she was young, and the Brat Pack and Hollywood in the late eighties.

  The car went across the Brooklyn Bridge and down Boerum Place. They got off at an abandoned street. A girl with a headset let them through a black metal door. It was an industrial building with an empty lot in the back. Right in the center was an enormous see-through cube braced by metal tubing. People were standing on a lift on one side of the cube, wearing protective goggles and throwing beer bottles into the cube. On the other side of the Plexiglas, people were goading them on by shouting obscenities. A DJ was to the side, playing with an iPad and a theremin. A group of spectators watched the goings-on from a set of risers. They were mostly in their thirties and wore curious, almost childlike expressions. “Who are these people?” Melora said.

  “Early adopters,” Lulu said. Melora was beginning to realize what it was that intrigued her about Lulu. She was like Gwen, fearless, original, and odd. Maybe if Melora spent more time with her, she could get some ideas on how to play the role. Everything would click and Teddy would stop criticizing her at rehearsal.

  A busty blonde with a deep, cigarette-marred voice came up to them and did a double take as she recognized Melora. “Melora, this is Patti,” Lulu said.

  “Sorry,” Patti said. “I just— My brother had a poster of you in Usurpia on his bedroom wall, and here you are. So postmodern.” The girl was wearing a low-cut black top that revealed stretch marks between her breasts. Melora imagined she had developed young and been a cigarette smoker ever since. Patti handed Melora a beer that said “Flying Dog in Heat” on the label, with a picture of one. Melora drank it quickly despite the fact that she’d never cared for beer.

  After twenty minutes of watching the throwing and two Flying Dogs in Heat, a burly guy who resembled Garry Marshall beckoned them to the lift. They rose slowly. The Garry Marshall guy handed Melora a pair of glasses, and then there was a six-pack in her hand, with empty bottles inside. Melora wound up and aimed at a group of emaciated young men on the other side. Her bottle didn’t break. “Harder!” Lulu shouted, hurling her own bottle across.

  Melora tried again after she heard one of the boys shout, “Your last movie sucked!” This time it shattered. Patti had the best arm, and Lulu told her she pitched like a dyke. Melora threw a few dozen bottles, and then Garry Marshall said it was time for them to give someone else a turn.

  Down on the floor again, two young men from the other side of the cube greeted the girls. They wore skinny jeans and Keds, somewhere between David Bowie and rude boys. Kenny. Lance. They had anorexic names. Kenny acted distant, but Lance said, “This is so random! Melora Leigh at Glassphemy!”

  “I never understood that expressi
on, ‘random,’ ” Melora said. “Why don’t you say ‘unexpected’ or ‘surprising’?”

  “What is your issue, man?” Kenny said.

  “Did you say my last movie sucked?”

  “You are way too paranoid for someone so rich,” Kenny said.

  Lance took her hand, and soon they were climbing flights of stairs and a ladder to a roof hatch. They stared out at the glowing Brooklyn sky, the shouts of bottle throwers floating up. A thermos appeared. They passed it around, none of them seeming to care about germs. Lance said it was magic punch. It was sweet and seemed to contain multiple kinds of alcohol. A slight summer breeze blew. Melora looked out at the rooftops and felt bad momentarily for having moved out of Brooklyn. WeWeVill had long ago grown trendy, with the Standard and the High Line and DVF. There were too many people. There was water, but there were also tourists.

  “It’s beautiful up here,” Melora said.

  The others had moved to another part of the roof, their backs turned. In the distance Melora saw the back of a sign that read KENTILE FLOORS.

  “I was really disappointed by Atlantic Yards,” said Lance. “You would have been so much better than Maggie Gyllenhaal.”

  “I appreciate that,” she said.

  “You have a lot more gravitas than the media establishment gives you credit for.”

  Melora thought about her own twenties, when she’d been doing films back to back, living in the Hollywood Hills, dating Anthony Michael Hall and Richie Sambora. She’d never stood on rooftops on September nights. She’d missed out on New York summers because she’d been working. She regretted that now.

  The others were laughing loudly and approaching their side of the roof. “What are you rapscallions up to?” Kenny said.

  “We’re just looking at the stars,” Lance said, taking a step away from her.

  The next four hours were hazy. There was more magic punch, and shots in the back of the Highlander, a house boat with a costume party and a woman dressed as Clara Bow. A strange bar that looked like the inside of an airport. At the bar a black man with humongous hair—Lulu said he was named Reggie Watts—performed, looping his voice and music and making Melora feel that her mind was an onion, layer after layer peeling away.