Tomorrow I am a Bat Mitzvah. I didn’t send you an invitation because I didn’t think you would come but now I wish I had just in case you would. My mother is making this all about HER. They wouldn’t let me get the shoes I wanted because they said I’m still growing and they’d be too small for me in five minutes, even though I am sure that my feet are not going to grow. My grandfather’s wife—he’s eighty and she’s forty—said that the first thing people notice about a woman is her shoes and her hair, which makes the shoes even more essential. My feet are an adult size six which I think is pretty much the best size you can have. Japanese women strive for that. I still haven’t written my Bat Mitzvah speech even though it’s tommorrow and I might say something about the hippocracy of not being allowed to wear adult women’s shoes the day I am supposedly offically an adult.
Instead of getting Bat Mitzvahed tomorrow, I am pretending that I am getting married and tomorrow I will move out of here and start my real life. I am a woman now, Arthur. A breast bearing, menstruating citizen of my community. Maybe I won’t even go through with it.
Maybe I just won’t show up and no one will notice I’m not there and they’ll accidentally bat mitzvah my mother instead.
I sent a picture of myself to the casting director Sylvia Fay. I am thinking maybe I could be in sitcoms.
I’m going to write my Bat Mitzvah speech now.
Instead of working on my Bat Mitzvah speech, I think I will write the beginning of a screenplay.
INT. NEW YORK CITY KITCHEN. DAY
CLOSE-UP:
The BLACK and WHITE TILES of an expensive KITCHEN FLOOR.
PAN TO:
Expensive COPPER POTS hanging on a POT WRACK
PAN TO:
Famous movie director, ARTHUR WEEMAN, stands reading a LETTER.
ARTHUR WEEMAN
(smiling, sotto)
Thalia.
CUT TO:
INT. GRAMERCY PARK SYNAGOGUE. DAY
THALIA, a lanky gamine girl with chocolate brown cropped hair stands, next to a RABBI, facing a congregation of FAT OLD JEWISH PEOPLE.
THALIA
(into microphone)
I don’t want to be here.
CUT TO:
EXT. GRAMERCY PARK SOUTH. DAY
Arthur Weeman is frantically running down the street holding the letter and a shopping bag.
CUT TO:
INT. GRAMERCY PARK SYNAGOGUE. CONTINUOUS
Arthur Weeman bursts into the synagogue, running down the center aisle. He pulls a shoe box out of the shopping bag and hands Thalia beautiful wooden high healed sandals with red leather straps.
ARTHUR WEEMAN
Happy Bat Mitzvah. Mozel tav.
He grabs Thalia’s hand and they run back up the
aisle.
That’s just the beginning but what do you think? I think it’s The Graduate meets Cinderella if you ask me.
Anyway, my Arthur, I am going to write my bat mitzvah speech about you. I’m going to talk about your movies and your time line and my true devotion to you. The truth is I never really thought you were an Awful Writer. There I said it. I think you’re an Awesome Writer. I think you’re the greatest writer who ever lived. Now you probably won’t respect me but I don’t care. After tomorrow I’m not a child anymore and the truth has to come out. I can’t keep writing to you forever, you know. Besides, according to all the newspapers, etc. you are really quite involved with someone! (No comment.) I wanted to say I love you, and thank you. Thank you for your movies and your brain and letting me write to you all year. It turned out to not be as bad a year as I thought it would be thanks to you. Thank you for everything. Maybe one day I’ll let you know how it goes. How it all goes. But until then, goodbye.
Your,
Thalia
The morning of my wedding I woke up next to my groom-to -be and did what all brides probably do. I called Mr. Moviefone. Arthur Weeman’s Thalia is playing exclusively at the Ziegfeld Theater, Fifty-fourth Street and Sixth Avenue. Today’s remaining showtimes are 10, 12, 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, and 12.
I called again. Arthur Weeman’s Thalia. Thalia. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.
And at ten o’clock I was sitting in the Ziegfeld, fourth row, first seat on the left side of the left aisle, watching it.
The film started with a spectacular shot of elephants, walking trunk to tail. You think they’re in India or Africa but then the camera pulls back to show you Thirty-fourth Street. Ace Woods, a famous filmmaker, is watching the elephants leave the circus. He pulls a letter out of his overcoat pocket, and we see it is from someone named Thalia, aged almost thirteen.
Without realizing it, I had risen to my feet. I turned to look up at the projection booth as if I could plead with the ghost of a projectionist to make it stop.
“Hey, lady, sit down,” someone said.
I was shaking. But there was nothing I could do. The film just kept rolling. Ace Woods received another letter.
But here was the twist. Thalia wasn’t the thirteen-year-old girl she claimed to be in her letters to the director. She was a lonely, repressed thirty-three-year-old woman played by Angelina Jolie who spies on the director from her kitchen window when she’s not working as a ninth-grade English teacher at the all-girls Drowler School. And the whole time she thinks she is spying on him, he is really spying on her.
There had been one day I thought our eyes had met. He was eating something at the window that I think the girl had made for him. A kind of soup. She was hovering around him, watching his every bite, and he was eating it animatedly, at first pretending he was afraid it might kill him and slowly bringing the soup spoon to his lips, screwing up his face, his hand shaking so most of the soup must have spilled, and then, after much mock surprise, he gobbled the rest of it up while she did things like hit him and put her hands on her hips.
I’d even put that scene in my novel.
I thought of my manuscript lying on my editor’s desk and bent over in my seat, certain I was going to throw up. There was no way my novel could be published now. Now Thalia belonged to him. I had given him his greatest film, sent it to him on pretty stationery, with upside-down stamps and lipstick kisses. I had saved him like Charlotte saved Wilbur, my eight legs curling in on themselves, shriveling to dust while he rolled in his glorious mud. My novel was gone. It was done. He had taken it from me.
And he had topped me. Especially the scene where Angelina Jolie masturbates at her kitchen window while he eats a plate of runny scrambled eggs at his.
And the scene where she finally gets a man to go out with her and she pulls a pair of “Ace Woods glasses” out of her purse and asks him to wear them when they make love.
And the scene where she lifts her skirt for the wax statue of him at Madame Tussaud’s while an amused security guard stands by.
There was the scene where I watched him filming snow in the playground, the scene where I saw him at Elaine’s, the scene where he sent me his brain.
In the final scene he meets the adult Thalia, whose real name is Rachael, at the merry-go-round in Central Park. He thanks her for her letters and explains that the carousel was transplanted in Central Park from Coney Island at the turn of the century and that it used to be pulled by blind horses. He tells her he has a brain tumor, he is going blind, and her letters pulled him through to make one more film—his last. While Angelina Jolie wept on the screen, I wept in my seat. But this time I didn’t weep because I was in the presence of genius. And I didn’t weep for Arthur Weeman. I didn’t even weep for myself or my ruined novel. What got me when it really came down to it was the thought of those blind horses walking around and around in a circle all day long in the summertime heat of Coney Island. It was too much for me to handle.
When it was over, I applauded.
“Shouldn’t you be getting ready for your wedding?” someone asked behind me. I turned to see Ivy Vohl standing in the aisle, looking down at me. “What’d you think of it?”
It was truly uncanny t
he way she always managed to ask the obvious. What’d she think I thought of it? I had just seen one of the greatest movies ever made and I was sitting there bawling my eyes out in a napkin.
“What did you think about the end?”
“What do you mean?” I asked. “I loved it.”
“I was a little disappointed with them meeting in the end. Too predictable.” If Ivy had been there when the Mona Lisa was painted she would have stood around saying how disappointed she was with the smile.
“That’s what’s great about it. It’s so satisfying. It’s what makes Arthur Weeman a genius. He knows just how far he can take it.”
“I think it’s unsatisfying to have them meet.” Ivy Vohl was like some kind of movie nymphomaniac. If this movie didn’t satisfy her nothing would.
“I think not having them meet would have been stupid.”
I collapsed back in my seat, exhausted. I was furious because a little part of me was disappointed that they’d met. Because he’d written that part without me. In my novel—may it rest in peace—I’d not dared to do it.
“Anyway, it doesn’t matter. I think it was his best,” Ivy said. “It was as good as Lolita, the distant love between Arthur Weeman and Thalia. The way they needed each other and used each other and ultimately betrayed each other. I wish my book was a fraction as good as that.”
“Thank you,” I mumbled under my breath.
“Thank you? Thank you for what?”
“Oh, just thank you, like thank you, I agree.”
“I’m really worried about my book. It’s about to be printed, and the galleys didn’t get such a great response.”
She looked so genuinely tortured by how great Arthur Weeman was and how untalented she herself was that I couldn’t help but feel incredibly sorry for her, the way you feel sorry for someone in the early stages of Alzheimer’s, who knows what is to come. She couldn’t make herself as good a writer as me, and I couldn’t make myself as good a writer as Arthur Weeman. Our creative visions were just carrots on sticks. No matter how hard we tried, we could only write what we could write. All writers were just blind horses walking in the same circle over and over again pulling our crappy books behind us.
“Speaking of which,” I said suddenly. “I’m writing a blurb for you. I’m working on something, something like: ‘Ivy Vohl is this generation’s Philip Roth’ or ‘Portnoy’s real complaint was that he didn’t know Vohl,’ something like that.” I was as stunned by what was coming out of my mouth as she was. It was my wedding day and I was the quintessence of bridal goodness. Beauty, I was sure, was radiating out of me, sparkling on my lapel like a diamond broach. Forgiving those who had trespassed against me was my something new.
“Maybe I’ll compare your protagonist to Lolita,” I said, with so much charity and goodness boiling inside me it made a soup that could feed every bum on the Bowery.
“But my protagonist is a man.”
“Of course, I know that . . . did I say Lolita? I meant Humbert Humbert,” I said.
I took a pen out of my pocketbook and wrote the Philip Roth thing and the Humbert Humbert thing on a napkin and signed it as solemnly as if it was a ketubah.
“Really?” Ivy said. She looked down at the napkin in disbelief.
“Sure,” I said. “I loved your book.” Maybe, I thought, I might even read it on my honeymoon, although it was unlikely. I wasn’t a saint. Blurbing it was painful enough, I shouldn’t also have to suffer reading it.
An usher cleaning the floor under the seats gave us a dirty look. Ivy tucked the blurb into her bag. “So, I’m looking forward to your wedding later. I’m going solo. Derek had to cancel because they’re closing the Thanksgiving issue of Maxim.” I didn’t even know she was coming. I had just assumed she wouldn’t be there after Isaac hadn’t given her the exclusive Arthur Weeman photos. A few people started to file in for the noon showing, very few I noticed. “You taking a cab downtown?” Ivy asked.
“I’m staying for the twelve o’clock,” I said. “I have to see it again.”
“I’ll see it with you,” Ivy said. “May I?” She smiled at me with her upside-down mouth and made her eyes a little less piercing than usual. I tucked my legs to the side and she slid in past me and called her assistant to say she was working from home. Then we sat there next to each other and watched the movie again.
In the middle, I had to leave to go get married. I had to meet my friend Cynthia Ree so she could do my hair and makeup and then take a car service from her studio to the restaurant. I had told Cynthia I wanted to look young and fresh, but now I wanted her to make my eyes smoky and drunk. I wanted to marry as a grown woman with a past, not a young girl with a future. I wanted my wedding to be funereal in nature, and I wished I had chosen to wear black instead of the gown I currently had draped over my arm in its dry cleaner’s plastic. All the best weddings were funereal, with people weeping in the pews.
Cynthia helped me struggle into my gown.
“Who’s the designer?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“You don’t know who made your wedding gown? What was it, your mother’s or something?”
“I got it at the Arthur Weeman warehouse sale. Candace Ann wore it in Adopting Alice.”
I could tell from the look on Cynthia’s face that she didn’t really like it too much. Candace Ann, it turned out, was a lot thinner than me in Adopting Alice, and the dress was a little tight.
“Are you sure you want to wear that hat with it?”
“She wore the hat,” I said. I took a long look at myself in the mirror and tried to adjust the hat a little but the effect suddenly seemed a little mushroomy.
“How about this?” Cynthia said gently, holding up a long, skinny black silk dress. There was nothing mushroomy about it. “I didn’t even like that movie. And Candace Ann was terrible in it.”
“She won the Academy Award.”
“Yeah, well, she didn’t wear that to the Oscars,” Cynthia said, snatching the hat from my head. And, like Frida Kahlo changing out of her white gown into something else at the last minute before her wedding to Diego, I changed out of mine.
When I burst through the old wooden coach-house doors of One If By Land, Two If By Sea, I suddenly couldn’t imagine my wedding any other way. My mother stood talking to Isaac’s mother. My father stood talking animatedly to my editor. Mrs. Williams was in her wheelchair, being pushed to the bar by Irmabelle. My L.A. friends were shivering by the fireplace and my writing buddies were gawking at them from the bar and hungrily grabbing hors d’oeuvres as they passed. The only one missing was Sascha. Still, I thought, even if it meant a lifetime of standing on St. Mark’s Place and staring up at her terrace and waiting for her, I could find a way to be her sister. I was good at staring at other people’s apartments and waiting for them, after all.
But then she walked in. Before I had a chance to go to her, everyone gathered, forming a tiny aisle, and my father walked me to where Isaac and the judge were standing. Just as the judge began to speak, I said, “Wait, stop.” The whole room gasped.
I walked back to the doors where Sascha was standing and grabbed her hand.
“What are you doing?” Sascha whispered, pulling her hand away from me.
“This is my sister,” I announced loudly. “Sascha, please come with me.” I grabbed her hand again, and pulled her up to the makeshift altar with me. “Everyone, this is Sascha Kettle, my father’s daughter who he had with Irmabelle. Irmabelle, please come here and stand next to Dad.”
Irmabelle froze for a moment and then walked elegantly over to my father. Everyone had turned around to look at her.
“Okay,” I said, handing Sascha my four-hundred-dollar bouquet.
“Hi, Toots,” my father said to Sascha. He took her head in his hands and kissed her.
“Don’t call me ‘Toots,’ ” she said.
“He calls me Toots too. I hate that,” I said.
“I love you both so much,” he said, kissin
g my head too.
Then Sascha started crying, and so did Irmabelle, and my mother started wailing, and even Isaac had tears in his eyes. Finally my wedding was just how I wanted it.
After we said our vows, Isaac and I did one of those pathetic kiss/hug combos instead of something a little more passionate and I wished we’d rehearsed that part but other than that I was completely happy.
“Rebekah, when do you get back from Italy? I have to talk to you about your book,” my editor said nervously, leaving her beef Wellington to come talk to me.
“You can talk to me now,” I said, taking a sip of champagne to ready myself. I was glad I was wearing black.
“This really isn’t the right time,” she said.
“Evan, I know about the Arthur Weeman movie. I’ve seen it.”
“Well, then I think we both know there’s a serious problem here. As you know, we were all very excited about your book in-house. It was the biggest book on our spring list. Oh, Rebekah. We really shouldn’t do this now.”
“It’s okay,” I said, looking over at my handsome husband across the room.
“I happened to get invited to a screening of the new Arthur Weeman film. Rebekah, did you plagiarize Arthur Weeman?” my editor asked.
I repeated the word “plagiarize” in disbelief. I knew my book couldn’t be published but I hadn’t thought I’d be considered a plagiarist.
“Well, then did you ‘borrow’ Thalia from Arthur Weeman?”
I knew I had forgotten something. My something borrowed. I had my something new: my sister, and, of course, forgiving those who had trespassed against me. And my something old: myself. Now my something “borrowed”: Thalia. And something blue: my mother who was still crying.
“I didn’t borrow Thalia from Arthur Weeman. I gave her to him,” I said. I’d have to think about borrowing later when I had more time, maybe look it up in the dictionary or something. Who had borrowed who from whom and is it possible to borrow something that cannot be returned, or for that matter lent in the first place?
“What do you mean?” my editor asked, angrily. “Why would you do that? Do you know him?”
I thought about that for a moment. In a way I knew him better than I knew anyone. “No,” I said.
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