Again, I didn’t go home to change. He met me at the station and suggested we go to a local café for dessert. I was disappointed not to see his flat, not to mention that this wasn’t an invitation to steamy smooching, which would have at least confirmed that he was at all attracted to me, but fair enough. One thing at a time.
At the café, which I’d passed many times before (Nigel used to live in this very neighborhood, and every step I took felt double, as if the old me and new me were both walking down these blocks), Jon got us an outdoor table. I very un-Britishly ordered cheesecake—calorically and financially decadent. We chatted excitedly about his upcoming trip to the Balkans and mine to Scotland. I was upset when the bill arrived.
And even more so, when Jon declared: “Since I’ve paid for everything so far, I think it’s your turn.”
Of course I would have offered, as I had every other time, but it was another thing to be told. Besides, this reeked of Andy, of Evan, even of Ben’s bags of money. And besides, it wasn’t even true. I had paid for the late-night burgers, for several drinks. I was always careful about that, overly conscious about the appropriate giving of gifts.
“Excuse me, but I like to be treated like a lady,” I blurted out, my cheeks hot. “Try to be a gentleman.” Then I got up and fled to the tiny bathroom at the back of the restaurant. I locked the creaky door and stared into the mirror. What had just happened? When had I ever run out on a date?
“Sorry for blowing up,” I said as I sat back down, “but I felt like I was being falsely accused.”
“My last girlfriend felt that I controlled our relationship because I made more money,” Jon said. “I didn’t want you to feel that way.”
“Let me get this one,” I offered, picking up the check.
“Next one’s on me,” he said. “Le Gavroche, here we come.”
“You’d better believe it,” I mumbled, noting our cheesecakes cost the equivalent of half a day’s museum salary or roughly twenty thousand stand-up gigs.
“So a fight on our fourth date,” Jon said as he walked me back.
“Guess so.” Just like our first, I didn’t say.
“The important thing is, we discussed it and made up.”
At the station he kissed me again, quickly, on the lips. And then he was off. And so was I.
• • •
DAYS LATER, I phoned Eli. “We have to do something,” I said. “She’s going insane.”
“I know. She’s been calling me at least five times a day, threatening suicide.” I nearly dropped the phone. I hadn’t realized she called him as much as she called me—even more. Her condition was getting worse. It was real.
“We need to get her on meds,” I said. “I’m gonna call Dad.”
“OK, keep me posted.”
I breathed. I had an ally.
But Dad was less of one. He didn’t want Mom to listen in on the call, so I had to ring him at work, at a predetermined time, like we were part of some larceny scheme. “Eh,” he pooh-poohed. “The medications don’t help. Besides, she’s not gonna tell the doctor what’s wrong with her. She’ll play it normal, that’s the killer. She knows it’s insane.” He went on about how hard it was to be caught up in her daily rants, how he tried to stay out until she was nearly asleep each night. I pictured him creeping down the dark hallways of Kildare, casting long, thin shadows on the stacks.
“Go stay at Carlton if you need,” I pleaded, feeling guilty about my own escape.
“It’s not so easy,” Dad said. But, I thought, even Bubbie got shots. There must be something—some psychiatrist, hospital, therapist—that could help.
• • •
THE NEXT WEEK, I’d just completed my round of London previews when I got Jon’s text. “Sitting at a riverside cafe in Ljubljana. Eating seafood. How’s your show?”
Not the most gushingly romantic serenade, but I liked it that he was thinking about me.
Then I headed home to pack. For the first time, I was going to the Edinburgh festival not as a struggling performer but at someone’s invitation. After years of begging for audiences and panic attacks about reviews, I was ready to do the festival on my own terms, with my solo show, which I’d created, directed, composed, designed, and performed. When I’d sat down to write it, I kept thinking about a passage I’d read that explained it takes four generations for trauma to pass through a family. I framed my show around four generations of mine. What had I learned from my history? In the show, I played not only Bubbie, who told a story about swimming with her sisters in the Vistula, but also my fantasy daughter, a thirty-year-old woman who, one hundred years after the Holocaust, felt settled in her Jewish identity, living a calm and content life in California. I didn’t play my mother; instead I’d had her record her lines. In the opening scene, a discussion between the various voices inside my head is interrupted by her. “Mom, what are you doing here?” I ask. “I’ll always be in your head,” she answers, light and laughing. “Even after I die, I’ll be here.”
Packing my gear, I looked around my apartment, which now served as my rehearsal hall, studio, workshop, and chill-out lounge where I watched TV late into the night. My quiet, safe space in here allowed me to better deal with challenges and rejections outside. Telling my own story of danger made me feel safer, even happy.
As I worked on this culminating show, a farewell to England, a fantasy of Lublin to LA, my childhood dream of moving to New York City—the land of liberty, a place where many old friends now lived, where I felt that standards and measures meant something and weren’t just a rehearsal for life—was increasingly tenacious. Being “foreign” had given me an excuse to be temporary and tentative but, I knew, it was time to make my home.
• THIRTEEN •
28 WEEKS: DREAMING IN OFF-COLOR
New York City, 2011
Jon and I were finishing our Saturday brunch at a Belgian restaurant, imagining how dining would work when the baby arrived—would we bring the stroller to the table? Wear her in a papoose? Would she cry hysterically the whole time, making us take turns walking up and down the aisle like the couple next to us was doing? How would we know what sauce she preferred on her mussels?—when the calls started. “Dad can’t get into the house,” Eli said from L.A. “Mom’s not answering the door. He’s locked out.”
“Dad doesn’t have any keys?”
“No one but Mom has the keys.”
“Where the hell is she?” I asked, thinking that she hadn’t left her house in over a year, trying not to think of her latest spate of panicked suicide calls.
“No idea.”
“Fuck,” I said, my chest tightening. “We have to call a locksmith.”
“Dad doesn’t want to,” Eli said. “He wants to drive to Carlton and wait there.”
“Wait for what?” I wanted to pull my hormonally lush hair out. Someone has to do something. How could he just hide out in his maternal abode? But, combing my strands with my fingers, I also understood his fear. I wouldn’t want to enter that house alone, either, and discover a horror scene. Wasn’t I just hiding out here?
Eli and I made calls. The police would take a missing person report after twenty-four hours. The Vermont border patrol could not disclose who crossed without a medical letter. The bus company had no record of her buying a ticket that day.
Where the hell was she? I’d gotten used to Mom being a shut-in, a permanent anchor lodged in my old home. It meant Kildare was always inhabited. It meant I could monitor her. The idea of her roaming free—or worse—made me feel unhinged, exhausted. My mind whirred. Not sure what to do, Jon and I decided to go ahead with our plans and, after a nap, we walked over to a friend’s garden party. This is what regular people do on weekends, I kept telling myself as we zigzagged across warm city streets, as my two realities zigzagged along each other. “Where the hell could she be?” Jon asked.
“Ha,” I blurt
ed as it hit me. “She’s probably coming here. Get ready!”
We both chuckled, but as the sounds of my words ricocheted through the humid air, it struck me that my joke could be the truth. Of course! That was exactly the kind of thing she’d do. No promises, no commitments, no forewarning; just a spur of the moment decision to come visit, possibly to off-load money so it wasn’t in her name and subject to whatever home-heist she thought was taking place, but also because she wanted to see me pregnant, to bond over this thing that was and wasn’t me, that was and wasn’t her, that was and wasn’t us both, separate and together. I knew it in my stressed bones.
“Where will we put her?” I asked, but had already made plans. She’d stay in the office for now, for the rest of the pregnancy. She’d be there in case I went into labor when Jon was out. I’d take weeks off work and she’d hang out with me in the city—markets, bookstores, doctors’ appointments—telling me stories about when she was pregnant with me as she did on the phone, but instead in the flesh, as we walked along the High Line or nibbled on freshly imported Viennese pastry in the Neue Galerie café.
Jon and I said hello to our hosts, and as guests stood around their lush midtown garden tippling cucumber cocktails and chatting about apartment renovations, I mentally planned the route to pick her up. She’d come into Penn or Port Authority, I worked out. Neither was far.
Then, over the verboten hot dog course, I felt a buzz in my pocket, jumped off the picnic bench and made my way to a corner of the darkening patio, watching a cat dart between the bushes and the back door.
“She called,” Eli said. “She’s in Ottawa.”
“Huh?”
“She’s visiting Barbara.”
“Barbara?” The urban topiary spun, geometric vines jetting in all directions.
She’d spontaneously decided to visit an old family friend.
No one is coming. I stared down at my belly, now occluding my toes, prompting my sciatica. The baby, I could feel, was pushing on all of me, in all of me, ribs, bladder, heart, kicking me senseless from the inside out. “But she hasn’t left the house in years,” was all I could say. She’s alive and fine, I told myself, but instead of feeling relief, envy soaked me like sweat. She had left her house—to visit Barbara?!
I watched the cat jet behind the garden wall, spurred on by the scent of rodents, the thrill of the catch. Even after all these years, after all my running, I just wanted to be with her. I still dreamed of her coming over. I was waiting for her, like she was waiting for me, each of us expecting the other to deliver things that we just didn’t, couldn’t.
• • •
“SORRY. I CAN’T meet you for dinner tonight,” Jon says. We are at a fancy hotel in London, with a grand bar and white barstools. I know it’s a bad sign, even before I notice that he is holding hands with—wait—a team of Russian prostitutes?
That night I woke up and found myself drenched in hormonal sweat. I was used to first trimester dreams of nursing coyotes and rekindling old flames, second trimester ones in which I had to manage streams of cats attached to me with long umbilical leashes or steer race cars from the backseat, and even the sporadic insane nightmare where I found myself on an NFL team in front of TV cameras with no understanding of how to be a quarterback, letting down my team, guilty that I used pregnancy as an excuse to get out of scrimmaging. But lately, I’d entered an even more troubling nocturnal world than that of professional sports: the land of deception and Lifetime movies. A world in which Jon died of brain cancer, or changed his mind about wanting children, or simply left me because I was no fun anymore.
I turned over to his side of the bed. It was empty.
Oh God. How would I do this alone? Having a baby was not my thing, it was our thing. It wasn’t just the physical reality that wouldn’t exist without Jon, but the possibility. I couldn’t do it—practically, emotionally, spiritually—alone. I just couldn’t. Where the hell was he?
I found him in the den. “What are you doing in here?”
“Um, you threw me out. Snoring.”
“Oh,” I said. “Sorry.” I left the room so he could go back to sleep. But how do I know he will stay? I felt palpitations. Jon’s greatest gift to me had been consistency, but what if life was never consistent again? People flip, turn wildly at the drop of a wrong word, a cry. Each time I let someone in, I opened myself to the risk that they’d make a mess and then walk back out, run away to unpredictable places. Even the baby could turn on me. She was in my stomach for now, but what would happen when she inched into the world, no longer relying on our connection? When this part of me, my literal flesh and fluid, was free-floating in the universe? The cord was thick, but was snipped off in a second.
SKELETONS IN THE CLOSET, AND EVERYWHERE ELSE
London, 2007
I was more nervous than I cared to admit as I stepped over the footbridge to the Tate Modern, focusing on placing one appendage in front of the other, on not looking down or thinking about how flimsy the structure was or about my general fears of suspension and deep waters and, well, dates. The bridge swayed and I reminded myself that it was supposed to. The side-to-side motion was its net; the give would save me.
It had been nearly two months since Jon and I had seen each other; one month since his crustacean message. He’d surprised me by texting two weeks after I returned from Scotland, asking how my show had gone and saying he’d love to get together. I hadn’t chased him, and yet, he’d remembered me. I was about to type back a snarky reply about his awakening from the dead, but my mind flashed with my mother’s advice: “Be nice and straightforward. Show men clearly that you are interested. Make it easy for them.” I’d replied that I’d like to see him too, anticipating we’d meet for romantic drinks that evening. Jon suggested “next Friday.”
Next Friday? Why not next year? At this rate, I thought, it would take a decade before we got to second base. This guy might drive like a meshuggener, but he was a slow mover. Or perhaps, I suspected, he wasn’t all that into me. Oy, I wanted an indication of where this was going! I’d suggested we go to a global cities exhibit since I knew he loved travel and figured it would give us material to discuss. But as I hit the museum’s lawn, for the millionth time fiddling with my hair, pants, mind, I saw Jon approach, shaking his head. “The show closed yesterday.”
He leaned in to hug me, his warm body soft and familiar. “I don’t know this area,” he said, “but I saw a tapas place on the way.”
My high-art plans did not seem to be serving me well in this relationship, but at least my knowledge of East London could help. “Let’s go to Baltic,” I said. “It’s Russian.” Would he like it?
He did. The dim, cavernous restaurant with its Soviet-inspired menu and jazz soundtrack was modern and romantic. The waitstaff was mildly nice. “I find this place normal,” I said. “Like New York.”
“I love New York,” Jon said. “I used to live there.”
My interest surged. We talked about cities, but not based on an exhibition. He told me about his summer in the Balkans and his various solo trips around the globe. Jon wanted to see everything, meet everyone. He could analyze a joke, but his conversation ranged wide, his political opinions fluid and not necessarily popular. While I moaned about how my local crafts market was shutting down, he thought it was best to see the positive in gentrification, to accept that change was inevitable and newness was exciting. He was up for discussion and debate, which I appreciated. His eyes twinkled and his smile became ever more attractive as the evening went on. I was glad our plan was improvised, that I hadn’t donned a costume, rehearsed.
Over sweet blini, he held my hands. I used the restroom, cleaning my teeth, straightening my bra. Tonight, I finally felt a real connection, that sizzling energy, sprouting between us. Tonight, I knew, was it.
I returned to the table to find that Jon had paid (we simultaneously joked about me slipping out at the right tim
e—we could even joke about our fights!) and was grabbing our coats. I followed him outside, waiting for him to suggest the next move.
“Let’s find a cab,” he said.
“I thought you didn’t do cabs,” I teased.
“For you, I do.”
“Ah, your inner Romeo finally makes its appearance.”
“I can do gentleman. Especially when specifically asked.” He winked.
“Touché,” I said as he flagged down a black car.
He opened the back door, and I crawled into the large passenger area.
Then he shut it.
Before I even had a chance to gasp in surprise, he explained through the window: “I need to take my friend Kate’s two kids to buy rabbits in the morning.”
Who? What? Rabbits?
“Why don’t you stay over for the night?” he offered.
I was about to say, well, yes, but to do that you have to get into the cab, when he continued: “Next Sunday?”
Wait, I thought. You’re asking me to have sex with you, for the first time, a week in advance?
He leaned all the way in the window, and gave me a final peck on the cheek, before telling the cabbie my address and exactly how to drive there.
• • •
I WASN’T FEELING well that Sunday, but I certainly wasn’t going to cancel. After months of confusing rapport with Jon, the ambiguousness was causing me serious existential itchiness. I wanted a yes or no answer.
I arrived at his apartment with my packed overnight bag only to be confronted by a massive bronze cow door-knocker. “This is quite something,” I said. The flat was the type of Victorian shabby chic conversion that everyone swooned over, but never appealed to me with its crowded rooms and quirky detailing, its stained glass and heavy drapes. Jon’s was spacious with large windows, but modest, Britishly filled with mismatched heirlooms, oddly stacked books, an alarming number of CDs, French country tables, and awkward empty spaces, seemingly unfinished. Upper-middle class, I assessed. At least it’s clean, I thought as I smelled fresh lemon.
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