Without You: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and the Musical Rent

by Anthony Rapp

  I nodded, sighing a little. “You’re right.”

  “So go get help,” she said again. “Because you don’t want something like that to happen again, okay?”

  “Of course not.”

  She folded me in her arms in a firm, warm embrace. “You take good care of yourself, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  And remarkably, there seemed to be no major ill consequence from my meltdown backstage at the Nederlander. Having lived through tornadoes back in Joliet, I recognized that the new peace that Todd and I were now experiencing was something like the rare tranquility that follows a violent storm. The truth of my infidelity was out, and the worst possible aftermath of that revelation had occurred, and yet in its wake, we had survived, a little the worse for wear, but stronger, too. It was as if Todd could relax now that his most vivid fears had been made real, and he had emerged more or less intact. But his surprising and graceful forgiveness and acceptance of me continued to move me, and I did my best to honor the opportunity he’d given me to make amends and redeem myself.

  And I did take Crystal’s advice, and started seeing a therapist on a regular basis, Robin, a kind and urbane lesbian who worked at Friends In Deed. Robin began to help me explore my family’s long history of avoiding conflict, the effect that legacy had on me now, my need to avoid saying or doing the wrong thing, my reluctance to admit to myself or to Todd when I was attracted to other people, and my reluctance, at times, to set clearer boundaries for how I should be treated, and on and on.

  And she listened as I shared stories of my mother, and she sat patiently as I wept at times, and our sessions became a safe haven. She began to help quiet down and smooth over the more jagged and noisy edges of my grief, so much so that soon I found that I was no longer as afraid as I had been of what I might say or do. And over time, I began to allow room for everything that was in me.

  Thawing

  The morning sun glowed through the skylight of our bedroom, waking me up. I quietly got out of bed and padded across the floor, softly closing the door behind me, leaving Todd asleep, and I headed out the glass doors onto the verandah.

  Our guesthouse sat at the edge of a three-hundred-foot cliff on the north shore of Maui, situated on a beautiful, remote outcropping. Where the coastline curved away to the left, whales came to spawn in the spring. We were on this vacation in October, so there wouldn’t be any whales to see, but I loved imagining what they might look like.

  I had expected Maui to be one giant tourist attraction, but I was delightfully surprised to discover how rugged and unspoiled and exotic much of it still was. I had never breathed in such fragrant and balmy sea air, or seen such an infinite variety of luminescent wild-flowers, or spotted so many surprising, instantaneous rainbows.

  Mom had been gone for almost five months now, and my relationship with Todd had survived, and even begun to flourish, in the wake of everything that had happened. My life in Rent had begun to shift: Jesse’s departure had been followed soon after by Taye’s, and then Fredi’s, until only Wilson, Adam, and I were left of the original eight principals. I had started to grow accustomed to, and even fond of, the different rhythms of the talented people who had been brought in to replace my friends, but I knew that my time in the show was going to end soon. I was starting to miss too many people too much. I was starting to become too haunted by phantoms.

  About a month prior to my trip to Maui, I had talked to Todd about wanting to take a vacation in time for Mom’s birthday. I’d anticipated that it would be a difficult time for me, a pointed reminder of her absence, and I thought that if we could be somewhere beautiful and peaceful and remote, I might have a better chance of making it through with more ease. Todd had agreed that it was a good idea, and since his brother Lawrence lived on Maui and knew a gay couple that owned a lovely guesthouse there, we had made our plans and booked our tickets and now there we were.

  And today was Mom’s birthday. Fifty-six years ago she had been born to Dolores and Robert Baird of Elmira, New York. She would be followed by twelve others. She had raised three children of her own and one that wasn’t her own by birth, but who had become her own. She had administered loving nursing care to countless children and juvenile delinquents and even murderers. She had taken every step she could to leave the people in her life at peace with her passing, and she had died with grace.

  I thought of all of this as I sat on the verandah, gazing out at the tremendously blue and endless ocean, wishing she could have lasted longer, wishing she could have managed to make the journey to such a beautiful place as this before she died. The only regrets that my mother had expressed to me before her death were that she wished she had traveled more, and she wished that she had had more fun. While I truly believed that Cy was right, that everything that happened in life was exactly the way it should have happened, because it did happen, I also truly believed that Mom had been too young, that too much of her life had been taken away by her death at fifty-five. If she had made it through her illness I would have made sure that she traveled more; I would have made sure that she had more fun.

  I heard the screen door open behind me, and Todd said, “How long have you been up?”

  “Just a little while,” I said, my voice thickened with tears.

  “Oh, honey,” Todd said, and sat down next to me and held my hand and rubbed my hair out of my face. This softness from him, which had been so rare at times, this loving touch, which I had not asked for but which I so desperately needed, melted me, and I sank into his arms.

  “She’s here, you know,” he said, his voice so soothing. He kissed the top of my head. “She’s right here.”

  “I know,” I said, and I breathed, pressing my face into Todd’s chest. “I know.”

  I stayed in the Broadway company of the show for another two months after our trip to Hawaii, finally leaving in January of 1998. I then joined the touring company for a couple of weeks during its run in Chicago so I could perform for my hometown crowd. That was where Anne and Rachel were finally able to see it. Happily, they loved it. Soon after that, I traveled to London with Jesse, Adam, and Wilson, where we opened the West End production.

  I was going to be in London in May, on the first anniversary of Mom’s death, and as the 22nd loomed ever closer, I felt an old, familiar, raw edge begin to creep its way back into my being. Todd was visiting me from New York at the time, and I sat him down one day.

  “I just want you to know that I’m starting to feel a little raw,” I said. This phrase had become part of our shorthand; I had become more adept at warning him of the days in which my grief was taking a larger toll than normal, although those days had become fewer and fewer over the last year.

  “Okay,” he said. “Don’t worry, I’ll be here.”

  It had been a remarkable turnaround; his new patience brought me tremendous relief. I still bore the brunt of his jealousy at times, and we still bickered and struggled through many moments, but overall, the peace that had followed my backstage explosion had remained.

  I braced myself for a meltdown during the performance on the anniversary itself, but I made it through without incident. Even during the reprise of “I’ll Cover You” and “Halloween” and “Goodbye Love,” which had often been difficult to get through following Jonathan’s death and during Mom’s illness and after her death, I held steady. I waited for the grief that was lurking around the corner of my consciousness to overcome me, but it stayed at bay.

  I was living in a flat on the south bank of the Thames, about a twenty-minute walk from the Shaftesbury Theatre, where Rent was playing, and that night, Todd met me at the theatre so we could take the walk together.

  “How are you holding up?” he said.

  “Fine, I guess.” And I was, surprisingly so.

  We walked along the narrow, quiet streets around Covent Garden, hardly saying anything. I sensed the beginnings of tightness in my chest, but I still felt strong.

  And then, when we crossed over the Hungerford Fo
otbridge and began to make our way along the Thames, something about the perfect beauty of the cool night air and the amber glow of the lights shining on Big Ben and Parliament and the unbearable knowledge that these were examples of the things my mother never got to experience and never would, prevented my legs from holding me up, and I barely managed to find a bench to sit on. And the tightness in my chest bloomed open into wracking sobs that wouldn’t stop. And it was worse than a year ago, when I was in my mother’s room with her dead body lying there, and I almost couldn’t breathe for the heaving of my chest, and it was horrible that all this time had passed and she wasn’t here but I was, living on and on, and there had been times in the past year when I had hardly thought about her, and how terrible was that, how selfish? I thought things were supposed to get easier as time went on, but this wasn’t easier, this was harder, the truth of her absence was harder than ever to take. I was drowning now, and I gulped down air, and Cy was wrong, there was no way out of this, it would never end, how could I return to myself in the face of the truth that no matter how hard I tried to get on with my life, no matter how much I tried to honor her memory, no matter how much I talked about her or shared stories about her or dreamed about her, she was dead and gone, and forever, and would never be able to comfort me or talk to me or scold me or witness my life for the rest of my life.

  I sat with my head buried in my hands, my face slick and hot, and Todd sat with me, resting his hand on my back. But none of it was breaking open and away, as so many of my crying fits in the wake of Mom’s death had. Minutes and still more minutes wore on. Flashes ran through my mind of myself crying in front of my mother while she was in her sickbed, when she had so tenderly reached out her hand and stroked my hair and soothed me, and this image brought harder sobs, the knot in my throat making it impossible to breathe.

  I could only imagine how twisted up and scarlet my howling face must have seemed to Todd or anyone who walked by, and without thinking I got up and stumbled to my building. I leaned against the wall in the elevator, unable to meet Todd’s eyes, wishing it would stop, it would all stop, and after a long, long while, exhausted and spent and hollow, and for the first time not cleansed by my tears, I was able, finally, to quiet down and drift off to sleep.

  Mercifully, that first anniversary’s awful power has been absent in the ensuing six. As time has gone on, I still experience an ache, on some days more keenly than others, and will undoubtedly forever miss my mother’s presence in my life. I always try to mark the anniversary in some way, sometimes by making a small toast or by sending up a thought, or, in one case, writing a letter to Mom.

  In November 2001, in the wake of turning thirty, and in response to the urgent reminder of September 11th that nothing is certain and that life deserves to be as full of love and joy and as free of conflict and hardship as possible, Todd and I finally ended our long, tumultuous, loving—but at the core always difficult—relationship. Part of my motivation to end it came when he confessed that all during the time he’d questioned me about sleeping with other people, after all of the endless conversations in which I’d defended myself, he’d gone out and slept with many people himself, several of whom were mutual acquaintances, and some of whom he’d accused me of bedding. At first, this news brought with it a sense of clarity. Of course he had been neurotically jealous; he knew what he was capable of doing, so he would naturally suspect me of the same behavior. I was happy to have the truth out in the open, since it made so much sense of our past. But as time wore on, and I thought more and more about how much work he’d put into deceiving me and how much energy he’d invested in accusing me, and for so long, not to mention how much he’d put us at risk by sleeping around (although we both tested negative after his revelation), I found no way to reconcile our past with our future. Todd agreed, and our ending was more peaceful than much of our relationship.

  He and I have both found new love in the wake of our breakup. Rodney’s and my three-year anniversary has passed, and we are beginning the long process of adopting a child. Our child will have its share of cousins: my sister, Anne, and her husband, Ken, have given their son Brendan two little sisters, Carley and Lilly, in the years since Mom died. Happily, Anne and I have managed to communicate more openly over the years—although there is always more room to grow—and have continued to give each other spirited competition in Scrabble. She’s done a fantastic job raising Rachel as well, who will soon graduate from high school and then pursue a career in law enforcement.

  My brother Adam’s children—so far—are of the literary, theatrical, and cinematic variety; he has published several novels and plays since Mom died (she was alive for the publication of his first two novels) and will soon start directing his second feature film. Because of our proximity to each other (we live several blocks apart in New York City) and our frequent artistic collaborations, he and I have grown much closer over the last several years. He has consistently provided a wonderful example of how to move on in the face of great loss by funneling his grief over Mom’s death into many of his artistic works.

  I had the privilege of performing in one of his plays, Nocturne, a few years ago, and I found great truth and comfort in these lines I got to say every night: “Grief does not expire like a candle or the beacon on a lighthouse. It simply changes temperature.”

  Postscript:

  Homecoming

  The frigid night air hovered at around 20 degrees Fahrenheit. Huge lights had been lofted into the sky on cranes, shining gorgeously onto Tompkins Square Park. A small crowd had gathered at the end of the block, huddling for warmth under a large tent on the corner of Seventh Street and Avenue B. I stood halfway down the block in the middle of Seventh Street and shivered, my breath pluming out before me. I looked up into the night sky and imagined that Jonathan was looking back down from wherever he was—if he was anywhere, that is—and if he was in fact looking down, that he was catching a glimpse of all of this.

  Then Chris Columbus yelled, “Action!” and the turbulent guitars and pounding drums of “What You Own” blared out of the speaker being held in front of me, and a camera crew, seated in the back of an electric car, led me down the street, filming as I, hardly believing it was all really happening right then and there and for real and forever, began to sing out into the cold night air, in the middle of an East Village street, this song that I loved.

  After many years of rumors and speculation and false starts, the film version of Rent was finally happening. Chris Columbus, with whom I’d made Adventures in Babysitting in 1987, had given many of us from the original cast the great gift of the opportunity to reprise our roles on film, and shooting had begun in New York City two days prior. We had already spent a couple of months rehearsing and recording in and around San Francisco, but this nighttime walk that I was taking down the middle of the street (a couple of blocks away from the apartment I’d lived in while I was performing in Rent at the New York Theatre Workshop and on Broadway) brought the reality of what was happening home more than anything I’d yet experienced while working on the film. I was in the real neighborhood where Mark and Roger lived, in the real city in which the story Jonathan had written all those years before was set, and I was doing it all more than ten years after performing in the original studio production.

  Even though I had been singing some of these songs for over a decade, when I walked into the first day of rehearsals on San Francisco’s Treasure Island three and a half months earlier, I couldn’t wait to start working on them anew. And as I sang through them with my old friends from the cast and Tim Weil, our original musical director, who had happily been hired to work on the film with us, I realized that I would never grow tired of Rent’s music. I would always be grateful to Jonathan for having written such gorgeous songs, which continued to fulfill and reward and reveal themselves in the singing of them, all these years later.

  I delighted in witnessing Tracie Thoms and Rosario Dawson struggle to contain their excitement as they felt for the first time
the overwhelming power of the harmonies in “Seasons of Love” surround them. Tracie tore into her solo with power and soul, went toe to toe with Idina in “Take Me or Leave Me,” and gave me good stuff to play off in “Tango: Maureen.” Rosario slinked her way through “Light My Candle,” howled her way through “Out Tonight,” and bared her heart wide open in “Without You.” Since not all of the original cast could be a part of the film, we were blessed to have Tracie and Rosario with us.

  I stood at the piano during rehearsals and listened as Tim led Jesse and Wilson through “I’ll Cover You.” Years before, in London, I had witnessed what I thought was their last rendition of this song, and here they were again, singing to one another with as much joy and love and connection as ever. I couldn’t stop beaming.

  I sat in the rehearsal room and was freshly devastated by the agonized and explosive wails of Adam’s “One Song Glory,” which I also thought I would never hear again.

  I joyfully leaped onto the table as we rehearsed “La Vie Boheme,” finding my groove again, rediscovering how spastic I could be, doing my best to lead the way as we danced and boogied and sang our tribute to all things bohemian.

  And as the weeks of rehearsal, recording, and filming continued, I felt that I had come home.

  As I write this, we have just finished shooting the film, and while I have only seen the first teaser trailer and a couple of brief scenes cut together, all indications are that the film will far exceed my hopes for its success. Members of the crew, many of whom had never heard of Rent before working on it, regularly went out of their way to say how extraordinary they thought the material was. Chris told us that he was making the most important film of his life. One of the crew members even told me he thought the film was headed for Oscar nominations. That may or may not come to pass.