Motherland

by Amy Sohn

  As a rule, Gottlieb had disdain for vintage-wearing women in their twenties. Freedy Johnston had a song about them, “Seventies Girl”: “You want to be older than you were.” This girl was more forties girl than seventies. She looked like she could entertain men on ships. Her set included “Out Here on My Own,” “Angel of the Morning,” “The Beat Goes On,” and “Frank Mills” from Hair. There were original songs too—about cradling a baby, and tumbleweeds, and a Ferris wheel that stopped. Evan and Andy seemed to be barely tolerating the music, but the girls were rapt.

  Gottlieb felt a kinship with the audience despite the fact that most of the other men there looked gay. They were listening so attentively that no one made clinking noises with their glasses. He felt like they were witnessing the birth of a new talent. Not quite Nirvana in 1988, but there was an energy here. Gottlieb felt that he was inside the songs as she sang them. There was something authentic about the girl that contrasted with the loud falsity of his meetings. He felt like this was what music was for, to make yourself lose your conscious mind, to drift out of thinking mode and into feeling.

  After the show, Andy and Evan took off in Evan’s car and Gottlieb said he was going to stay out a little longer. Andy cast him a measured glance that he pretended not to notice. Evan made a blow-job gesture that the girls couldn’t see. In the alleyway, people swirled around, praising the singer. Gottlieb spotted Tim Robbins and a few faces he recognized from premium cable dramas. Lara and Tiffany lit cigarettes, and Gottlieb bummed one, though he hadn’t smoked in ten years. The buzz was strong because it had been so long, and as he felt his head swim, he wondered why he’d given up cigarettes. When you were a parent, many vices became more elusive, but that didn’t mean they were unworthy of pursuit.

  “So what do you think?” Lara asked.

  “She’s pretty good,” he said. “What’s her name?”

  “Hattie Rivera,” Tiffany said.

  “Apparently, she was a subway busker in Boston and then hitchhiked here,” Lara said.

  “I heard she was in a Duncan Hines commercial when she was a kid,” Tiffany said.

  The crowd stubbed out cigarettes and got into their cars, and then Tiffany conferred with Lara and disappeared. “Do you want a lift?” Lara asked.

  He didn’t know whether she was hitting on him and figured it would become clear sooner or later. “Sure,” he said. “I’m staying in West Hollywood.”

  “Okay,” she said, like she already knew. Lara drove a Dodge pickup that smelled like dog, and he asked her a lot of questions about the truck, how she came to choose it and how it ran. At the Sunset Tower, she pulled into the roundabout. He was drunk, and her skin was smooth and white. “Do you want to come in for a drink?” he said.

  She looked at him as though trying to gauge whether she could summon the enthusiasm. She started to open her door, and the valet rushed around to get to her first. They were probably used to this, people coming back with guests not sure whether they were staying the night.

  Gottlieb started to lead her to the Tower Bar, but she tugged at his hand and headed for the elevator. Oh. In his room, she went to the window and pressed her body against it. He offered to fix her a drink, but she declined, and while he was fixing one for himself, she approached and kissed him without much kindness or sweetness.

  He ran his hands through her white-blond hair. She was the first new woman he’d kissed since he’d been married. Whatever happened after this—whether he told CC or didn’t, felt guilty or didn’t—things would be different. The Gottlieb who lived with CC and the boys was not the same Gottlieb who was out in Los Angeles. This Gottlieb could do what he wanted with whomever he wanted because he was powerful and on the rise.

  They stood against the wall, making out for a long time. He hadn’t expected it to feel this big to kiss someone new. “Why were you so rude to me at first?” he murmured as they stumbled into the bedroom.

  “I thought you were full of yourself about your movie,” she said.

  “I’m not. I just didn’t want to jinx it in the room.”

  “Please don’t say ‘in the room’ while we’re making out.” On the bed she writhed out of her minidress. She had small breasts and a thin, rail-like body. He ran his hand down her hipbones. She wore high-waisted underwear, and because she was slender with protruding hipbones, it was dorky-sexy.

  “So you aren’t drawn to me because of my incredible Hollywood power?”

  “If I were drawn to incredible Hollywood power, I would have fucked Owen Wilson the second time he asked.” She was unzipping his jeans, pulling them off with his boxers. And then she was crouching above him, blowing him with an artfulness he had never experienced. This isn’t CC.

  Lara not Lawra had focus and precision and seemed to be doing a trick with her throat, slight swallowing and crazy tongue action. Was she a professional? Whatever else she did, she was an artist at this. In his head, he heard the music of that strange girl at the Hotel Café.

  Lara was on him, putting him in. “Should we use something?” he asked.

  “I already put it on you, with my mouth.”

  Wow. He watched her long torso rocking above him and reached up to caress her puffies. So young and high. Why didn’t they stay like this forever? He thought of CC, her mother, Young Sook, and the kids to keep from coming. Just then Lara not Lawra opened her eyes wide as if surprised at something he’d said and exhaled a long yogalike breath.

  Was this her orgasm? He was unsure. He opted to take it as a green light and came hard into the condom, feeling for it with his hand at the same time to be sure it was there. He felt so good and reckless to be coming inside this girl.

  He lay back, and guilt washed over him like a breaking wave, but he punched through the back of the thought and sat up in the bed. He leaned in and tried to give Lara an appreciative kiss. She was already up, putting on her minidress, slipping into her flats. She put one finger to her lips, gave him a little half-sarcastic wave. Then she was gone, the hotel room door closing with a certain-sounding click.

  Rebecca

  Rebecca was used to awakening in the middle of the night for no reason: It was one of the hazards of becoming a mother. For the first few years it had been her children who woke her up. Now that they were both sleeping through, she would sit up straight at one or four for no reason at all—some biological vestige of the maternal protective instinct—and sometimes she couldn’t fall back asleep.

  So she wasn’t surprised when it happened at two-ten soon after her Montauk Club night. Though she could not remember what she had been dreaming, it was so dark that it took a few moments to orient herself. She realized that Theo was not next to her.

  This was odd, because like most men, he slept the sleep of the dead and did not usually move from his supine position until the alarm went off. Not even to pee. She got out of bed and checked on the kids, Benny in his crib, Abbie in her toddler bed. They were deep in slumber, arms splayed out as if they were flying. It was easy to love children when they were sleeping. She padded down the hallway to the living room, but it was empty, and so was the kitchen.

  She had a flash of fear that he was with the Archie/Veronica woman from his office. An affair? Where would they go? Her place? Somewhere close? One of the new motels in Gowanus? The Brooklyn Motor Inn, maybe, the one by Hamilton Avenue that advertised in the pre-movie slide show at Cobble Hill Cinema, as though date night couples might make a spontaneous sojourn to a motel by the expressway for a quickie.

  She poured herself a glass of water from the freezer dispenser and sat on the couch. That was when she noticed that the door to the apartment was slightly ajar. She stood and went to the kitchen window and saw a figure sitting on the stoop.

  She fetched her robe from the bedroom and went downstairs, walking down the carpeted stairs in her bare feet. As Theo turned at the noise of the door, she saw him stuff something into the pocket of his shirt, a chambray button-down. “What’s going on?” she asked.

  �
��I just needed some air,” he said.

  “What’s in your pocket?”

  “Nothing.”

  “There’s smoke coming out of it.” She reached down over his shoulder to grab it. He elbowed her to stop her. “Take it out.”

  “Okay, okay.” It was a small marble pipe.

  “You smoke pot?”

  “Sometimes, I guess.”

  “You always hated pot.”

  “I never hated it. It’s kind of a crazy story, like, it’s kind of complicated. But really simple, too. Remember in June, that package that was sitting on the downstairs mantel forever? From UPS?”

  “Theo, like, it’s three in the morning. What’s going on?”

  “Well, it had this really faded address, and I figured it was for someone in our building, but no one picked it up. One day I got so frustrated that I opened it to see who it was for. It turned out there was pot in there, wrapped in cellophane. A lot of pot. A lot.”

  “Whose was it?”

  “No one in our building. It was someone at 899 Garfield instead of 899 Carroll but no apartment number. The UPS guy delivered it by accident. I walked over, and there were like fourteen apartments, and what was I going to do, ring every apartment buzzer and say, ‘Hey, did you lose a bunch of primo weed?’ ”

  Rebecca couldn’t believe it. She had never heard him say “primo weed” before. “I knew I couldn’t return it,” he went on, “so I stuck it in the freezer, and after a couple of days I got curious. I went out and bought rolling papers and smoked it one night after you were asleep. It was totally different than the stuff I had at Swarthmore. That shit made me paranoid. Pot is a different world now. People who smoked in the nineties have no idea. This is medical-quality.” He sounded rapturous, as if he had just discovered Napa pinot after a lifetime of Carlo Rossi. How was this possible? Theo had gone to Harvard Graduate School of Design. Harvard architects weren’t stoners, there was too much to get done.

  “I thought you were having an affair,” she said.

  “I’m not having an affair.”

  “Who was that woman in the background, when I called you from Wellfleet?”

  “I told you, it was the TV.”

  “Where’d you get that shirt?”

  “Brooklyn Circus, on Nevins. That place is a testament to the power of reimagined streetwear.” Was the pot turning him into a dandy, making him rethink his entire wardrobe?

  “Why are you doing this? You’re in your thirties, not your twenties.”

  “That’s when life for men gets toughest.”

  She felt like an idiot for not seeing the signs. All the nights he spent in front of Comedy Central watching The David Keller Show, his newfound enthusiasm for Jimmy Kimmel, the historic basketball games on ESPN Classic. Lately, he had become obsessed with Reggie Watts, the stream-of-consciousness improv composer with the huge Afro and shifting personae. He would try to make her watch his videos, but she would grow bored and impatient. Sometimes when she talked, Theo looked at her like he was Jordan Catalano on My So-Called Life. She had mistaken that half-confused look for focused attention. In reality, he had just been stoned.

  “So are you high while you’re giving the kids a bath?” she asked.

  “What does it matter? You’re drunk every night anyway.”

  “Not drunk! Buzzed. I have, like, two glasses of wine. I can’t believe this. All these years you’ve been giving me a hard time about being an inattentive mother, and you’re on PCP for the witching hour.”

  “I think you mean THC,” he said, and chuckled. The worst part about pot was that it made everyone who didn’t partake seem uncool. It was a superior drug, a smug one, which Rebecca found ridiculous, because everyone who smoked it acted like an idiot.

  For two years she had been the one in the marriage who contained multitudes, and now it turned out he did, too, even if it was just multitudes of marijuana. Though she felt betrayed, she was unsure whether it was wise to lay into him, given the fact that approximately thirty hours earlier, Stuart had been going down on her in the reception room of the Montauk Club. When she had returned home that night, she got in the shower, diligently scrubbing herself, the Lady Macbeth of the vagina. Lady MacBush. Theo had come back late from his “dinner.” Now she suspected he had been stoned. She hadn’t smelled it on him. Had he smoked outside, changed shirts surreptitiously in the living room? Feeling guilty about what she had done at the Montauk Club, she had pretended to be asleep when he came in. It occurred to her now that he might have been relieved.

  Did a secret pot habit equal an illegitimate baby and a faked conception? Probably not. A crack habit, maybe, but not pot. “So you were smoking that night in Wellfleet behind Joanne and Andy’s house?”

  “Yeah. I gave them some. The girls loved it. They said they’d never tried anything that good.”

  “Why’d you lie to me?”

  “I knew you’d give me shit.”

  “I can’t believe you drove the kids home stoned.”

  “Weed is good for driving.”

  “Good for bathing children, good for driving. Is it good for everything?”

  “Pretty much.”

  Theo’s hair looked choppy. Usually, he wore a generic retro-1940s look. This was more late punk rock, channeling Thurston Moore. It seemed deliberate, expensive. “Did you get a haircut?” she said.

  “Yeah, I tried this new guy near my office. He does Bowie. And Liv.” In the past Theo had said that any man who spent more than thirty dollars on a haircut was out of his mind or gay.

  “Since when have you cared about celebrity stylists?”

  “Someone recommended him, so I gave him a try.”

  “Are you sure you’re not having an affair?”

  “Yes, I’m sure.”

  “I don’t know about this,” she said. “This isn’t you. It’s so strange.”

  “Look, Rebecca, we all have private things that we do. That we don’t tell our spouses. Right? And that’s okay. There’s nothing wrong with it. Ten percent of every person should remain completely private.”

  She contemplated the 90 percent of her life that was private from Theo and said nothing. He went in first, and she sat on the stoop for a minute before she got scared that she might get mugged and followed him inside.

  Melora

  “What is this shit?” Teddy Lombardo said to Melora. It was five p.m. and the cast was gathered in the front rows of the Bernard Jacobs. Their first preview was in one night. Tonight was the final dress. She had come in a few minutes late and Teddy had raced up to her, holding the New York Post. Page Six had run an item on Melora attending Glassphemy! and it had been picked up by BroadwayWorld.com, Fucked in Park Slope, Brownstoner, and Gothamist. She had been hoping Teddy wouldn’t see any of the blogs.

  WHACK-TRESS

  Has Melora lost her mind complete-Leigh? Sources say she went on a wild binge Tuesday night, including a party in Gowanus, Brooklyn, in which glasses were thrown against Plexiglas for sport. After behaving erratically, she kissed a twenty-six-year-old luthier, Lance Williams. “We were just talking and she kissed me,” he said. “And then she said no one would ever believe me.”

  Her evening also included an event called “Bike-in-Theater” held in Greenpoint and a masquerade ball on a boat moored in Red Hook. Perhaps Leigh, who sources say is struggling with her role as Gwen Landis in Broadway’s Fifth of July, is having another midlife crisis. Several years ago she was photographed vomiting on the Flatbush Avenue Extension.

  Her behavior on Tuesday was said to be “loopy.” According to one attendee of Bike-in-Theater, who watched a film projection of A Streetcar Named Desire with Leigh, “The fact that she’s hanging with hipsters is either a totally brilliant move of postmodern irony or the pathetic action of an over-the-hill has-been. Ask me when I’m less hungover.”

  Sources say that ticket sales for Fifth of July, which opens September 30, are not as strong as hoped. Though Mad Men’s Jon Hamm was expected to generate high sales
, ticket brokers and group sales agents say advance sales are only $500,000. Contrast that with the $4 million that Nicole Kidman drew in 1998 for David Hare’s The Blue Room, in which she was briefly naked. At that time, Kidman and then-husband, Tom Cruise, were soon to open in Stanley Kubrick’s sexy Eyes Wide Shut.

  Whether Hamm is less of a draw than AMC fans believe, or whether it’s the lack of nudity in the play, Leigh’s recent antics are not expected to do much for ticket sales. The bad economy doesn’t help, either. Perhaps if Leigh took off her clothes, we might see an uptick. Until then, don’t expect Fifth of July to be a hot ticket.

  “It’s the Post,” she told Teddy. “Nothing they write is true.” The other cast members were pretending not to be eavesdropping. When she caught Jon Hamm’s eye, he looked down at his phone.

  “So this is made up?”

  She giggled, unable to stop herself. “I don’t really remember.”

  “Oh God. It is true. Why are you getting bad press before we’ve opened?”

  “I don’t think this is bad press, Teddy. I’m a citizen of New York. I’m entitled to go out.”

  “This makes you look like a desperate party girl. They’re gunning against you already. I’m trying to protect you, but you’re not helping me. We went through this with Sienna in Miss Julie. When there’s this much anticipation, you have to keep a low profile, so when we open, you can wow them. Jon and Allison are being so good. Jon just goes home to Jen every night.” Jen was Jon’s longtime girlfriend, Jennifer Westfeldt.

  “I live with my son,” Melora said. “I have to get away from him sometimes.”

  “Stay out of the outer boroughs, where you’ll get into trouble! I need this behavior from you onstage, not off.” He wandered away. She could hear Alessandro Nivola tittering. Jon Hamm whispered something to Chris Messina.

  She marched over. “Do you have a problem with me?”

  “Not at all,” Jon said with his smug Don Draper–esque grin. “I was just wondering what a luthier is.”