So I was astonishing, a dazzling creature of tangled, alluring complexity. For five minutes, at seventeen, in the Barbara Stanwyck Theater on a Wednesday.
I said my last line, blurted it in a manic breath. I heard the famous teacher say, “Stop there.” I felt dampness leaking under my arms; I was glistening with what I would have guessed is called “flop sweat”; I could even feel a trickle down the side of my neck. I opened my eyes (they must have been closed for the entire last line). Avril stared at me, her lips quivering. Her face was red and she was clearly on the verge of tears. Was I that bad? I could feel the whole room on the edge of a deep intake of breath, and then into the breach came an avalanche of intense applause. What a thing, Ada. The rough din of all that sudden hand-smacking: you actually can feel it as well as hear it. It is an assault; it is as if they are trying to break in to you somehow. They are laying a claim to whatever it is you just created. I nearly fainted.
The teacher appeared out of the dark and mounted the stage. He waved his hand at the audience and the applause abruptly stopped. His face betrayed no apparent pleasure or displeasure: it was a studious, controlled expression. (One should expect nothing less from an acting teacher than control of the face.) Then I realized his intent, his concentration, was fixed. And it was not fixed on Avril; it was fixed on me. I was along to merely assist, but I was asked to join the workshop on the spot and Avril was not.
Looking back, I must concede there was a little more to it than my coincidental impersonation of a gifted actor. The more to it that I am alluding to is the way I looked. This is a sketchy thing to discuss, but I was frankly pretty in a very actressy way. I had that extra-pretty shine that seems to fix to actors, a shimmery charisma that you can’t miss even if the actor has unwashed hair and no makeup on. I saw Cary Grant, once, at the Beverly Center on a Saturday afternoon. He was silver-haired, way past his heyday. Yet he was that extra-shiny thing, a gorgeous old man, not at all like anyone else there. What is more, he seemed to suck up all the attention in the place, he was like a black hole, drawing curiosity and desire like matter toward infinity. And it had nothing to do with fame, at least not for me, because I didn’t even recognize him. I noticed him before I saw everyone whispering and I discovered who he was. A young woman pushed the shopping cart as he strolled alongside; he appeared conspicuously unaware of the gaze of others as he attended a cantaloupe with an outstretch of his cashmere-covered arm. His power came from his electric prettiness, his extra glow. If we were all in a painting, he would have one of those intricate halos around him, gilt-traced, radiant. That’s exactly what it was, a radiance that felt holy. At least as holy as one could feel shopping at the Beverly Center on a Saturday afternoon. I nearly stopped and applauded as he walked by. We all nearly did.
My extra-prettiness was a minor version of that. I had the regular, symmetrical features of a pretty girl. I had the slim yet plush figure of the standard object of desire. And on top of that I had this little sparkly extra thing, the thing that makes people think you ought to be an actor, the thing that makes everyone sneak disbelieving glances at every detail of you. (Does the exquisite hollow of her philtrum meet her lip at exactly the most alluring depth? Yes, it does. Do her tiny pale earlobes hang only halfway before attaching in the most elegant and demure way? Oh yes. And so on.) I still have some remnant of that kind of beauty, but even I know that it really peaked for me at around seventeen. Some women grow into their peak beauty: they are deep, powerful creatures. Some women seem to miss it entirely, the sum of their pieces becoming somehow less than is really fair. My mother was in the latter category. Her attractiveness had always felt unrealized. She was fifteen pounds away, or she needed a new haircut, or clothes that fit her better. But that was an illusion. She just didn’t add up in quite the right way, and no matter what she did, there would always be something just out of reach for her. She was a woman who always appeared past her peak but who actually never had a peak. And then other women, like me, peak very early. It is a subtle distinction. I mean, I was still quite pretty at twenty-five. I am still reasonably, wearily pretty at forty-seven. (Way prettier than I need to be, especially now that I am a writer.) But when I was on stage at the Barbara Stanwyck Theater, in that audition for that very exclusive acting workshop, it was natural for people to mistake me for a born-to-be-a-star type. I looked like someone whose fabulous peak was yet to come. (Because what peak beauty ever reads like a peak? It must all be becoming, it must all be a leap into the future for a woman.)
He, the famous teacher Herbert Mintov, stopped the applause and we all stood there. He ignored Avril and looked into my face. I remember he cupped my face with his hands, but I am sure that can’t be right. That would be creepy. Herbert was full of all sorts of character flaws, but he would never have made the mistake of appearing creepy. So he didn’t actually touch me, but he did something that was an appropriate teacherly version of that, something along the lines of opening a hand toward me, nodding sagely at me, and saying I was invited to join the class. As I recall, nothing was said to Avril, and so it was with the brutal terms of the acting world. How could I refuse? I had no idea what I was going to do in this life. When you grow up in Los Angeles, sooner or later it occurs to you that acting could be your calling. Especially if you were more or less recruited, Schwab’s-style, into the thing.
As you might have guessed, my acting career went steeply, vertiginously downhill from that first brilliant peak. Herbert’s mistake soon became clear to me, Herbert, and the other students. (But not Avril, of course, because we were no longer friends. She was convinced, and she could have been right, that I upstaged and displaced her. That she never had a shot. Which might have been true, but it certainly wasn’t on purpose. And my refusing Herbert’s invitation would not have furthered her cause in any way, that was clear. I do think it gives the lie to one acting cliché: it isn’t true that if you surround yourself with brilliant actors you will only look better. What is true is you will look weaker. All other actors are your enemy, tarnishing and interrogating your aura of holy radiance. What you need is to be surrounded by serviceable, competent journeymen. Avril learned that and so did I.)
I hate, so deep in this little digression, to insert yet another actor cliché, but if I’m here for anything, it is for truth, for disclosure, for the full story, no matter how tacky that full story might make me seem. It will all, in the end, figure in to the decisions I have made recently. All mistakes lead to further mistakes: all we can do is make a plausible, causal accounting. And maybe I can be excused for the predictable trajectory of my actor’s journey. Here it is: I did have an affair with Herbert. Of course I did.
But I really should get back to the story of Nik, I should have said how all of this pertained to Nik. Nik, unlike me, never had a doubt about who he was or what he wanted to do. He didn’t wait for people to tell him what he was good at. He didn’t just go along with some authority figure the way I just joined Herbert’s acting class because I was invited. I don’t think you could flatter Nik into doing something he didn’t feel all the way through him. But me, I had to say yes to Herbert’s offer, and then I had to sleep with Herbert, too. I don’t need to invite your disgust by going into the details of our lurid assignations. I did start it, I think it is important to be truthful about who initiated things. I knew Herbert wanted me, that was obvious. So I started an affair with him because I felt sorry for him. I was such a terrible actress, he was so completely wrong about my potential, and there he was, stuck with me in class. I brought the whole place down. I was so stiff and self-conscious on stage that I made everyone—all these talented, ambitious actors—hate acting. They would watch me do a scene, and they would think: I hate acting, I hate actors. I quit. I know this was how they felt when they watched me. When you aren’t good at something, you just make everyone despair about anything ever being good again. That is why Gertrude Stein said “Bad art smells human in all the wrong ways.” And bad stage acting is the worst of all—you are s
tuck right in the room with the embarrassment of the actor’s failure. You become a party to the failure. And there I was, in this room full of very talented actors, actors who could take you to the depths of anyone’s soul. Actors willing to enliven the most hated skins, actors capable of impersonating—of infusing personhood into—whatever words some dark little writer piled up on a page. And they did it with flesh and spirit, they did it with breathing, they did it with finely elucidated human detail. These actors were Zen geniuses, selfless beings capable of both extreme control and fearless spontaneity. They could listen and react to each other, and yet they were disciplined in their devotion to text and coherence. They observed every little self-revealing tic and gesture. They had such endless insight into the compelling whys and ways of human behavior. They prized the integrity of the souls they created; they were fearless.
Except, of course, when they watched me.
Or even worse, when they had to perform with me. I embodied their rediscovered fear. As the class continued, my bad acting became more and more elaborated and intricate. I have to be exact about this—if there is any possible accomplishment in these sentences, it dwells in exactitude. So here is not just how bad I was but how I was bad: I wasn’t lazy. I memorized my lines (by rote and repetition, by groping, by blind will). I wrote notes in the margins. I thought of Motivations. Objectives. Actions. As-ifs. I dutifully penciled them in. I had, I believe, deep insight into the characters I was assigned. I would go to the library and do research. When I was supposed to have pleurisy, I read every detail of what pleurisy does to you (it creates a heaviness in your lungs, labored breathing, and knifelike cutting pain in your chest). I read about the Depression. I read about St. Louis. I worked hard at my acting. I am, if nothing else, an extremely hard worker. I have always worked hard because I have always had to.
You must understand something: Nik and I went to crowded urban public schools. We lacked supervision, parental or any other kind. Necessarily, our education was an act of autocarpy. We didn’t know a thing we didn’t teach ourselves. Nik found a way to revel in his self-conjured education and even saw it as his strength. As the twelfth-century literary genius Abu Jaafar Ebn Tophail wrote in his primordial epic novel, Philosophus Autodidactus: “The feral child will develop the purest form of creativity.” But for me it was different: my feral childhood left me hounded by doubt. When you are self-taught, you get a lot of things wrong. You mispronounce words because you never actually heard anyone speak those words aloud. You use what linguists call hypercorrect language that is in fact not correct, like sticking whom all over the place. Or you use the first-person subjective pronoun I even when you should use the first-person objective pronoun me because you think the word me is only for selfish children. You try to never say the word like, because you can’t be sure how to do it without thinking about it. You learn to second- and triple-guess your instincts, which can really change how you make your way through the world. You are slow because you have to take the long way around to everything. No utterance comes without labored preparations. None of this weighed on Nik, but I always found it humiliating that I didn’t even know what I didn’t know. So my hard work, unlike Nik’s, was underwritten by a kind of despair. I worked desperately hard, you see? I couldn’t give up. I was determined to at least be a rigorous failure.
Herbert did try his best with me. He patiently and clearly expounded the techniques of controlling your body as an actor. I did his Movement exercises. I did his Breathing exercises. I did Sense-Memory exercises. I hummed, I shook out my limbs, I pliéd.
But.
Nothing could override my continuing and enduring awfulness. For all of my efforts and Herbert’s efforts, I actually started to get worse. But that isn’t exactly true. I couldn’t have gotten worse, that wasn’t possible; it was just the longer my attempts at acting went on, the more hopeless it felt to do it. My actual performances were strikingly consistent and uniform: I would get on stage with all of my hard work behind me. I would carry it all out there. I didn’t go blank or anything like that. Here is precisely what happened every time: nothing. I couldn’t take all that underlife, all that between-the-lines annotation, all that hard-willed work and alchemize it into any felt thing. I couldn’t feel. I couldn’t make anyone else feel. As Herbert said once, in exasperation (in bed, actually, after we had had perfectly fine sex), “It is make-believe, don’t you get it? You just have to make me believe. You can get away with whatever you want if you can make me believe it.” Which I couldn’t do, and Herbert could not teach me. I thought of it all, I even thought of not thinking, but I felt nothing, convinced no one. At last I quit. When I finally told him I was done with it, I didn’t just feel relief, I felt a deep release, a reprieve from being so horribly bad.
But now I understand that I had it all wrong. The issue isn’t, Am I good enough? No. The issue is, Do I not have any other choice? Will and desire don’t matter. Ability doesn’t matter. Need is the only thing that matters. I need to do this.
Enough, Ada darling. I’m way off subject and I don’t seem to have managed my task very well. You will say, You haven’t explained, why didn’t you do something if you knew? And you are right, I did know. And you are wrong, I shouldn’t and couldn’t have stopped anything. I will try to make you see that. I will try again after I sort things out. And Ada, despite my rambling and middling self-recriminations, don’t—please don’t—pity me. Or Nik. As Gloria Steinem once said, “Pity is simply hate without the respect.”
Yours always,
Ma
Denise stuck the letter back in the envelope glued to the page under the taped-in, cut-out typed heading July 1, 2004. This was not a letter from Denise to her daughter, Ada. It was a sham, a hoax, a put-on. This document was from Nik’s Chronicles. Denise found it there, as she was meant to. This was a letter, written by her brother, in her style—or his conjured style of her—for his Chronicles. He did a rather fascinating and painful facsimile of Denise, a witty, brutal parody of her. For her, actually, because Denise was pretty much the main audience for the Chronicles (besides Nik himself, of course). He exaggerated her pretensions, her diction, her grating trebly qualities. He made fun of her memory skills. (Denise took supplements to aid memory. She did brain exercises. She convinced herself that her ability to remember was speedily evaporating.) She pressed her hand against the open binder. She smoothed the page and could feel the weight and chunked thickness of all the pasted-in entries. The sun had come up, she could see a faint glow at the seams of the garage door and in the small row of windowpanes. She should call someone. What would she say? She tucked the open binder under her arm and climbed up the ladder through the trapdoor to Nik’s apartment. She made a cup of coffee with Nik’s plug-in percolator. She pulled back the black curtain on one of the east-facing windows. The pink edges of the dawn made the scrubby desert oaks look carved in light. It was very quiet. No coyotes or cars. She sat down at his desk with her cup of coffee and pulled the volume of the Chronicles toward her. She took the faux letter out and read it again.
He didn’t really exaggerate her digressive tendencies, she couldn’t argue with that. All that ridiculous acting stuff. She had taken one acting class and she wasn’t that bad. She was commonplace bad. She was much more commonplace in all respects than this Denise-on-steroids that Nik created for the Chronicles, which she knew was never meant to be about the facts or actual life out in the world.
As for the fake quotes, she got a kick out of those. That was Nik’s signature affectation for her, his marker of anything rendered in her voice. The made-up quotes were her attributes, like Saint Lucy always appearing with her eyes on a plate, but the reference was only understood by Denise, only really understood in the context of the entire Chronicles, and so, finally, a profoundly elaborated private joke between them.
What was he getting at with some of this? Nik threw little pebbles and they pinged against the glass; his versions of the two of them kept very close in their own weird-logic
way. There was no question that she would have to call Ada next. She would have to account for her actions—or lack thereof—to Ada. She must delineate, with some exactitude—as he ironically put it in his fake letter—the truth of their sadness and troubles.
It was also accurate to say that Nik reveled in his solitude and Denise did not. She figured that was the first thing that separated them—that and when she began to become his audience. It wasn’t just that Nik got a guitar from their father. Nik took it, grabbed hard at it, and never let it go. They diverged early, and after that there was no changing or stopping him.
From where she sat at his worktable, Denise could see his original guitar perched on a stand in the corner. An Orlando with a rosewood body “just like a Martin.” Nik had taken good care of it. She knew he felt there was some destiny to the day he received it: the Beatles, the guitar, the last time they would see their father. She knew because Nik felt there was destiny in everything. The story was part of his legend: he hadn’t even wanted a guitar—it never occurred to him, he would claim with a laugh. And yet it changed his life. Which was true, it did change him. It took him over like a disease. From that very evening he would not quit with that Orlando.
He used to sit by his record player and listen over and over to the same song until he figured out how to play a particular lead. He didn’t read music or learn music theory. But Nik had a capacity for dogged devotion. He was doglike, really, the way a dog will chase a car it can never catch or will never tire of retrieving a ball you throw. He would come home from school or a party or a date, and he would automatically pick up his guitar, in just the same kind of habitual and nearly compulsive way Ada would run to her computer. Many times Denise remembered trying to tell Nik something and he would still be playing his guitar, working something out with fingers and string. It irritated her, the way he would sit there, then say, Yeah? And nod as she spoke, but still stealing glances downward, his left hand depressing strings, his right hand clutching a pick, just touching the pick to strings without strumming. He was showing Denise this great amount of attention and respect by not actually strumming. She said, one time when she really wanted him to listen, “Could you just put your guitar down?” and he looked at her as if she’d asked him to put his arm down.
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