by David Leite
“Well?”
“What?”
“Enough gravy?” She tipped her chin to the plate.
“Oh, yes, thank you.”
She wheezed down into a chair, in front of an old, dented beer can, and pulled on her cigarette, tapping the ash into the opening as she talked. She asked me where I was from, what I was doing in Pittsburgh, what my nationality was.
“Port-a-geese?” she said, creasing her forehead. She looked like I’d said something wrong. I winced inside at her unknowing slight, but said nothing. My mouth was too busy enjoying what years later I learned was braciole.
Her simple act of kindness—feeding a virtual stranger, so much like something Vo would do—added a sense of normalcy to my days, which were beginning to telescope and grow more disjointed.
When I was done mopping up the sauce with a slice of white bread she insisted I eat, I leaned over to kiss her. She offered her cheek, holding her cigarette behind her while waving it back and forth, trying to keep the smoke out of the hall. “Thank you.”
“Now, get outta here and go to sleep.”
In my room I lay on my bed, satisfied, wondering why she’d finally invited me in after all these months. I knew she sometimes cracked her door and watched me coming home. “Night, Clara,” I’d toss over my shoulder while unlocking my room, as if to say I know you’re there. “Night,” I’d hear, then a soft click of her door closing. Did she spy something through the crack this time? I was chronically tired and felt stung, because the gossip about Andrew and me had roared through the department. (Yes, I was the big mouth who’d told the class’s other big mouth, Kelly Horowitz, who told everyone else.) In the retelling, I had become the reviled predator pouncing on the unsuspecting, straight-to-the-core foreign student. The cockiness that had buoyed me in first semester was now drowning in self-doubt and second-guessing.
So I wrote. By March, I’d filled hundreds and hundreds of pages in my journal—all a pinball game of ricocheting, clanging feelings. One day everything was dark and lifeless; I wasn’t good enough. I had to “try, try, try harder, do better, work smarter.” I concocted plots against me, of how my classmates were banding together to undermine me. Jealous was the word I underlined so many times I wore right through the pages. They were jealous that Bridget and I had been Angela’s favorites. Jealous that she’d gone to Mel Shapiro, our department head, campaigning to move us into the sophomore class—a proposition he’d flatly refused. Jealous we were so close. “Stop being an asshole,” I reminded myself in the margins. The next morning I’d awake, journal spatchcocked by my side, and in long, cursive strokes designed to fill up more pages faster, because geniuses wrote fast and big, I’d write how I was the smartest, cleverest, most talented, and vastly superior being in my world. I created my own principles, rules to live by. I theorized that good, true drama—the dramas of Chekhov, O’Neill, Williams—wasn’t concerned with the middle, that gray, insipid world where most of us live our lives, but with only the highs and lows. The crashing conflicts and deep, foundering pain. I even drew a diagram that looked like wavelengths, but with the tops and bottoms lopped off by horizontal lines. I extrapolated from there, saying that if drama took place in those highs and lows, that was where I, as an artist, had to live my life—with Bridget, the only other true artist in our class, by my side. By bedtime, though, I would have turned my pen against myself, scrawling that I was cruel and vindictive, grandiose. I made promise after promise—to God and myself, to Bridget and our unborn kids, to my classmates—that tomorrow I’d be different! Better! Improved!
What’s weird is that none of this struck me as mental. I thought I was experiencing the near-hyperbaric pressures of the program: the What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger thinking that was the unspoken motto around the fine-arts building. But this felt different somehow. At RIT, I’d been determined to do well in the communication-design department, but I’d jumped headfirst into the deep end of campus life: I’d gone to mixers and keg parties. I’d gone out for pizza and Genesee beer at three in the morning. I’d joined a bunch of guys who mooned students crossing our quad. I’d smoked some pot and unknowingly shotgunned hashish. (It was only when I was standing in a shower stall in the women’s bathroom, belting out the score of Fiddler on the Roof, because I was suddenly beguiled by how the acoustics flattered my voice—and most of the residents were convulsing with laughter—that I’d figured out something was amiss.) My school work had been important, but so was having a blast.
At CMU, though, I had to consider socializing a distraction, something trifling; otherwise I could get ousted when the department made its cuts at the end of the year. My determination to be the best in the class was nearly pathological. I had always been competitive, but in acting, movement, and voice and speech classes, not only did I clamor to be the best, I also silently wished for others to fail, gloriously. And when they did—fizzling in an improvisation, tripping during a movement piece, losing control of their breathing—I soared with a wicked, vicious relish.
When the warm weather hit Pittsburgh that semester, I felt an energy vibrating inside me, like an expertly plucked cello string that produces a magnificent sustained tone. Instead of craving sleep, as I had all fall semester and during the rotting black of winter, I got a cattle-prod jolt in the ass from the lack of it. I challenged myself to get up even earlier—six, five-thirty sometimes—and do my voice exercises, read scripts, write in my journal, meditate, scrawl dozens and dozens of affirmations and tuck them in the Bible my parents had given me that I still carried.
I was often out of the house before the morning rush. Pittsburgh’s acrid air was bracing, urging me, stroking me to move, to glide. I walked to school, timing myself each day to see if I could make it in less time. Every morning when I walked in front of a resplendent old mansion on Fifth Avenue that had been converted to apartments, I wondered what galas, debuts, and chamber concerts took place in its once-elegant rooms that I could only glimpse if the tenants had their shutters opened.
Standing there one morning, awash in sudden and rapt appreciation for the old façade, I could feel blood coursing through my body. No, not coursing, bounding. Muscles, tendons, ligaments were frizzling, live wires stripped of their plastic covering. I felt like the life-size nude self-portrait we’d had to draw for art class at RIT. Half our bodies skin, the other half flayed to red, striated muscles. And just as I’d been exquisitely aware of each band of muscle while I was drawing it, arcing from joint to joint, I was now wondrously aware of the ripple of them. I was no longer walking, I was gliding, eliding, sliding. When I was a kid, I’d dream that I was floating along, my feet never touching the ground. That was how it felt to walk down Millionaire’s Row on the way to school. From my airborne perch of superiority, I grew sad: If only everyone could feel this way, I thought.
Riding the bus, I imagined a film camera attached to the side, capturing the most nuanced of my expressions at golden hour, the time of day when the sun washes everything in a Crayola-color sunset. With my head turned away from the other riders, I’d cry because my parents had been killed when their hot-air balloon crashed over the Périgord after they’d lost consciousness eating spoiled pâté, leaving their two-hundred-million-dollar fortune to their church. Cut! Or, in a stunning about-face, Bridget (who in real life was growing weary of my reversals of sexual orientation—“Why don’t you install a revolving door on your closet?” she had tossed out one night) ran off with Andrew. Cut! I’d scrub the tears from my face and smile dreamily, trailing a finger along the glass as I wrote the name of my newest boyfriend. Cut! And when the bus dropped me off, I’d pretend I was arriving in Pittsburgh for the first time, penniless but determined, thrilled by the size of the city and the warmth of the people. If Mary Tyler Moore was happy in her Minneapolis street, tossing up her knitted hat, I was delirious among the gorgeous architecture of Oakland, a section of downtown, with its august library and the awe-inspiring forty-two-story Cathedral of Learning, part of the Univ
ersity of Pittsburgh.
My speech went high-octane. I clocked more words per minute than ever before, even in my Chatty Cathy days of high school. No one said anything about the change, because I was funny, charming, arch. (Of course, they may have been terrified I’d rip into them if they did. I never bothered asking.) I was turning into a social beast. A party? Sure, I’ll come. Dinner downtown? Of course, let me get my jacket. My exchanges with others took on a profundity that required me to crack open my heart now, immediately, that instant. Bridget kept a close eye, occasionally tugging back on my sleeves if she thought I was going too far, which pissed me off and sparked spittle-sprayed shouting matches back at her dorm room. Leaps of faulty reasoning were common, which sometimes led to impulsivity and stupid-ass behavior. Like the time I smeared Nair all over my face so I’d only have to shave once a week, leaving my cheeks and jaw looking like mounds of ground lamb.
Then came the eleven-part BBC production of Brideshead Revisited. Ditching crew, I slunk off to an AV room in the library with the first few episodes under my arm, not knowing what to expect. Wearing enormous headphones, a giant praying mantis, I watched the beauty of the relationship of Charles and Sebastian unfurl, my face slicked with tears, my chest heaving. The elegance and languor of their lives, the droll elongations and trills of their speech, were so far from the clomping charmlessness of Swansea and my Portuguese family. I ached to be with a man again. To have endless afternoons with his head in my lap, eating ripe figs, profanely juicy plums, and peaches that blushed like a Scot. To wear tuxedos during the day and warm wineglasses over a candle’s flame to fully appreciate the 1899 Château Lafite Rothschild. I devoured those riveting, lazy days of eating, drinking, swimming nude—marveling at Sebastian’s ruddy cheeks; those blond, blond bangs; his petulant glances at Charles, and wished they were meant for me.
In the shower one morning, that ache turned into an idea. I was seized with the conviction that I would write, produce, and direct a film version of an F. Scott Fitzgerald short story. It didn’t matter which, as long as the men had aristocratic noses and porcelain skin and wore white suits and straw boater hats, like Charles and Sebastian. I’d shoot it at that old mansion on Fifth Avenue and cast it using my classmates. All I needed was funding, and certainly there had to be a National Endowment for the Arts grant I could apply for.
“Of course there is, old man!” Anthony Andrews, who played Sebastian, booms as he steps into the tub, his teddy bear, Aloysius, clasped to his chest. He stands there, fist on hip, chin aimed high, eyes glancing over at me to make sure I’m amused. When I laugh, he grabs a sponge that looks like a pink crenelated brain and begins washing my chest. And as he runs the sponge lower, lower still, his pouty mouth curls into a devilish smile, and his already haughty eyebrows raise even higher, suggesting more.
Researching at the Carnegie Library, in Oakland, I took notes in my journal. Pressure. I felt a hard, kneeling pressure. Some force was pushing me to write faster and faster, as if I were hearing dictation I needed to catch before it evaporated into the stale air. The writing caromed from subject to subject. Suddenly, I veered off, and was no longer thinking of Fitzgerald and sculpted chests with blond hair glinting in the light as it swirled down into linen waistbands. Instead I wrote about me, about how special I was, unique, unstoppable. My thoughts tumbled faster and faster and faster, until they began to collide, tripping over themselves, racing one another to the period at the end of the sentence. I couldn’t keep up with the words I was hearing in my head and sat there swimming in letters astheybegancrashingintoeachothernotmakingsenseanymore.
And we have liftoff, folks!
Words uncoupled from meaning. Even their sounds clanged foreign, like Norwegian or Czech or Malay. I dropped my pen and closed my eyes. I tried to calm myself, but a night sky’s worth of stars suddenly poured through a hole in the top of my head, flooding me with a light so opalescent and blinding, the hairs on my arms snapped to attention, feeling like a million tiny erections. I was so filled with light, I was sure if I opened my eyes, I’d be able to see the shadow of bones and the red glow of blood in my fingers, my nails shining like dimes, just like the young Christ in Georges de La Tour’s painting Joseph the Carpenter.
I knew with an evangelical conviction the likes of which I had only seen in my mother that I was one of God’s chosen. I suddenly understood there were thousands of us across the globe who were part of a Holy Web that protected and healed the inhabitants of Earth. That’s why I was so talented, handsome, and passionate, and that explained why so many people were jealous of me. That also explained what Bridget saw in me. I was one of the Divinely Divine, and it was only a matter of time before people began to recognize my Special Gifts. (Apparently, when you’re touched by God, you Capitalize Everything.) Maybe I’ll leave school and go to India and study to be a guru. But why? Because I can shave my head, wear orange robes, and be a guru right here, right here in the middle of Pittsburgh—I have the power of the Infinite Universe on my side, and there’s nothing that I can’t do or become, because never has there been someone as unique, gifted, and connected to the Sacred as me.
The stars then coalesced into a burning white geyser and shot out of the top of my head, leaving me so amped up, I busted out of there and walked all the way home.
By the end of the semester, I had been rubbed raw—exposed sinew and bone—by the quickening of my mind. There was no longer a separation between me and any living creature. I felt a symbiotic connection to everything, which caused me to weep over the tiniest things—an exhausted housefly banging against the window trying to find its way out, a smile from the checkout girl at the Giant Eagle. I saw it as a sign that I was exquisitely sensitive, and that only I could find the astonishing beauty, sadness, joy, and wonder in everything around me.
As Bridget and I packed to leave for New York for summer break, I had nothing but benevolent empathy for everyone at CMU, because I could only imagine the pain and self-loathing they must have experienced from having me around—a constant reminder of their possibilities and how sadly they fell short. And if I needed proof, when I burst into the administration office after the semester ended to get my grades, Mindy, the assistant to the department head, said, “If we gave out awards, you’d get outstanding freshman of the year. You had the highest GPA!”
I flashed a smile and thanked her, the first in what I was sure would be a long line of worshipful fans.
17
MY MAN PLAN
David!” Bridget’s mother barked, as if I had told an obscenely off-color joke. And then to the waiter, “He’ll have the veal chop.” She handed him her menu. “And so will I.”
Bridget and I were in New York City, dining with her mother at some marvelously snooty French restaurant with sconces on the wall and silver bread baskets. Whenever I defaulted to the simplest or cheapest dish, Mrs. O, as I took to calling her, would interject and order for me. “Remember,” she said, splitting a roll with her knife and spreading a gossamer-thin smear of butter inside, “you can get chicken at Kentucky Fried.”
In her lighter moments, Mrs. O had a touch of Auntie Mame to her. Together with Bridget, she introduced me to French wines and prosecco, which I like more than Champagne; duck—confit, seared, and Peking; lasagna Bolognese, the real kind, with plenty of besciamella; crisp sweetbreads, with their soft, creamy insides; fondue (nothing hoity-toity; it was at some low-end chain in Pittsburgh); île flottante; and the venerable tarte Tatin. Every so often at dinner she’d look at Bridget, who would smile that crooked smile of hers. Clearly, they were enjoying fattening me—like a Toulouse goose—during my Great Gastronomic Education, and I was all too happy to oblige.
Despite our escalating fights—long, dramatic shouting matches straight out of Tennessee Williams or Arthur Miller—Bridget and I had decided to spend the summer together. I wrangled us jobs as camp counselors at Birch Grove YMCA in the Catskills, starting in July. It didn’t pay much, but it meant I wasn’t going back home, which I
would have considered failure. Ever since starting CMU, I’d been determined to prove to my parents I could take care of myself, and spending the summer in Swansea was the last thing on my list.
Mrs. O worked for a group of theater producers and had arranged internships for us at a casting agency for the several weeks before camp started. In exchange for not being paid, we could see as many shows as we wanted for free. And we did. Torch Song Trilogy with Harvey Fierstein, Agnes of God with Amanda Plummer, Amadeus with Frank Langella, Medea, Dreamgirls, Cloud Nine, Deathtrap, Children of a Lesser God. I assisted on auditions for countless shows, and loved to walk through waiting rooms of hopeful actors, some in their seventies, a blank clipboard in my arms for effect.
Before the shows, Mrs. O would often take us to dinner on her expense account. That was how I found myself salivating in front of a veal chop the size of my forearm, surrounded by swirls of gilt, chandeliers with millions of winking miniature prisms, tuxedoed waiters, thick starched napkins. Until that summer, the fanciest restaurant I’d been to was a place in Seekonk on a field trip for seventh-grade French class, where I could have sworn I had gotten drunk on the chocolate mousse.
On our own, Bridget and I went on the cheap. We practically moved into the Magic Pan crêperie, near her mother’s office. My favorite dishes were the beef Bourguignon crêpe and the orange-and-almond salad. Earlier that year, Bridget had given me a crêpe pan and cookbook as a nothing gift. She knew I loved all things French, thanks in part to Dina and her French stuffing, and that summer I did a face-plant into pounds of butter. I was staying on West Fifty-Sixth Street at the apartment of a friend, Ron Trumble, who was acting in Children of a Lesser God. At night when he was performing and Bridget had gone home to Long Island, I pulled out the crêpe ingredients, propped up the cookbook on the back of the stove, and wrapped a towel around my waist. Squinting at the directions, I mixed the loose batter exactly as instructed, letting it rest in the fridge so it could bloom. I had absolutely no idea what that meant, or how to tell when it had flowered. I expected the batter to expand, the way I’d seen soft, cinnamon-speckled domes come to life in Vo Leite’s warm kitchen in Somerville, Massachusetts, when she was making massa souvada—an eggy sweetbread with a shiny top the color of aged cherrywood.