by Marc Acito
“Anyway,” Natie says, “long story short, it turns out this place is rent-controlled, and I figured, what with your name being so close to Eddie Sanders’s…”
“What are you talking about?”
Natie plops down where the Demon Barber of Fleet Street slashed his victims. “You know what rent control is, right?”
“Sure. The rent is low and it only goes up a little each year.”
“Exactly. But only until the tenant moves out or dies. Then it reverts to market value.”
“But the tenant did die.”
“You know that. And I know that. But the landlord…”
“Natie, no.”
He goes over to the desk and retrieves a stack of canceled checks. “Look,” he says, showing me a check for $400. “Here’s Eddie’s last rent check. See, Edward Sanders. Now all we have to do is go to the same bank, open a new account for Edward Zanni with the same address on the same-style check, sign your name Edward Scribble-scribble, and the landlord will never notice.”
“Won’t they notice my name printed at the top?”
“Not if the check looks the same. And we can camouflage it with a coffee ring.”
I regard Natie’s munchkin face, behind which lurks a sinister criminal mind. Baby Face Nudelman. “Is this even legal?”
“What’s illegal? You’re paying from an account with your name on it. If the landlord’s too stupid to notice, that’s his problem.” He wags the check in front of me. “Do you have any idea how hard it is to find a rent-controlled apartment in this city? This is a gift.”
“But two hundred bucks a month is fifty more than I’m paying now.”
“For a goddamn hammock,” he says. “C’mon, lemme show you the bedroom. It’s got a loft with room for a futon underneath. You don’t mind climbing a ladder, do you?”
Natie and I aren’t the only ones with new domestic arrangements. After returning from the Almost Shah’s wedding, Ziba moves into her aunt and uncle’s Upper East Side town house; being the kind of people who use the words summer and winter as verbs, they needed someone to look after the place when they’re not around. All six floors.
The town house is the size of my new apartment building. In fact, it is essentially a cleaned-up version, The Prince and the Pauper, its facade curving toward East Seventy-seventh Street to capture the light, bulging like a well-fed belly.
It also has columns. I can’t believe I know someone with columns. It’s like something out of Edith Wharton. But instead of our being greeted by an ancient family retainer, Ziba opens the door wearing a bikini top and a sarong, her bottle-shaped body anointed with oil. She looks like a character from a South Seas epic who wandered onto the set of a drawing room comedy.
“Boyzzz,” she says, tickling under our chins with her fingernails, which are entirely too long to actually sew anything at the Fashion Institute.
The front foyer looks like a hotel lobby—black-and-white marble floor, crystal chandelier, potted palms—plus a swirling staircase, the kind where aging divas make entrances in musicals. It takes every bit of testosterone I have to resist racing up a flight and belting out a showstopper about living life to the fullest.
Ziba leads us to the elevator instead, a gilded birdcage equipped with a brass-filigreed porcelain telephone. “It’s too bad your aunt and uncle have fallen on hard times,” I say.
“Yeah,” adds Natie, “I’d be embarrassed to stay in a dump like this.”
Ziba picks up the receiver. “Jeeves, would you please throw these gentlemen out?”
“So how was the wedding?” I ask.
“Oh, y’know,” she says, adjusting her cockscomb hair in the mirror.
No, I don’t. But I’d love to find out.
The doors open. “Here we are,” she says. “Fifth floor. Ladies’ lingerie.”
We round a corner and ascend a narrow flight of stairs, the top of which opens onto an Arcadian vision so lovely it makes you want to write a poem about it. It’s easy to imagine oneself chim-chimereeing from roof to roof, sailing along the top of Manhattan without ever having to mingle with the huddled masses below.
And there, in the middle of it, leaning against a wisteria-laden arbor, stands a nearly nude forest nymph.
“Surprise!” Kelly crows, thrusting her arms in the air like the cheerleader she once was. She wears a bikini, her pink skin looking distinctly undercooked. On the wrought-iron table next to her, a bottle of champagne chills in an ice bucket.
“What are you doing here?” I say, inhaling vanilla as I hug her, as if she were a yummy baked good. “Why aren’t you in Akron?”
“I had a meeting,” she says. She hugs Natie, who holds on to her too long.
“What kind of meeting?” People our age don’t have meetings. And we don’t open bottles of champagne on the roof gardens of million-dollar town houses, either. What the hell is going on?
“I had an interview with an agent,” Kelly says. “And he signed me!”
Ziba pops the cork, which goes off like a gunshot.
“What?”
“Congratulations!” Natie says, taking advantage of the moment to hug Kelly again. The little horn dog.
“H-h-how?” I say. But this is not what I mean. What I mean is, Why? Specifically, Why you and not me?
Kelly explains that the choreographer for Oklahoma! was so impressed with her work as Dream Laurey in the dream ballet—not only as a dancer but as an actress—that he recommended her to his agent, who, get this, represents GWEN VERDON. “Can you believe it?” she squeals. “She’s, like, my idol!”
Please. Kelly didn’t even know who Gwen Verdon was until I made her watch Damn Yankees.
She continues: “Irving thinks I should take time off from school.”
Irving? Already he’s Irving? I want an Irving. How come I don’t have an Irving?
“He said I’m perfect for commercials and soaps.”
This is too much. “Are you s-sure that’s a good idea?” I sputter.
“But of course,” Ziba says, resting her cocoa brown arm on Kelly’s pink shoulders. “She can stay here with me.”
Great. Kelly gets an Irving and an Edith Wharton building with columns. Plus someone to have sex with on a regular basis. “What about school?” I ask.
Kelly raises an eyebrow, a consequence of hanging around Ziba too much. “I’m a dance major,” she says, dropping a sugar cube in her flute. “It’s not like a real degree.”
“Exactly,” I say. “You don’t have any acting training.”
“Edward!” Ziba says, her cat eyes flashing. “You sound like you don’t want Kelly to succeed.”
I know I’m being petty. If I were a rock ’n’ roller, I’d be Tom Petty. If I were in the navy I’d be chief petty officer. If I were underwear, I’d be a petticoat. “Of course I want her to succeed,” I say. I just don’t want her to succeed before me.
“Actually,” Kelly says, “I told him all about you.”
And just like that, flowers bloom in my soul as I immediately envision the New York Times Arts and Leisure piece about how Broadway’s newest sensations dated in high school.
“What did you say?”
Seven
Pinnacle Management sits high above the theater district, but it might as well be a world away. The lobby of the glass tower thrums with office-type people—men in suits carrying briefcases, women in suits wearing sneakers—all of them rushing to get upstairs to do whatever it is office-type people do.
I am not one of you, I tell myself as I dig out from the elevator, I am not one of you. Granted, I’m not meeting with Irving Fish to discuss my bright future on the Great White Way. During Kelly’s interview Irving mentioned that he’d just lost his assistant and, faithful friend that she is, Kelly recommended me. Having just paid a $100 fine for disorderly conduct, I’m in no position to turn it down. Besides, who knows where a talent agency job might lead?
“I know who’d be perfect for the part,” I imagine Irving saying as I
take dictation. (Not that I know how to take dictation. But, hey, it’s a fantasy.)
“Who?” I ask. In my fantasy, Irving has slicked hair and a pencil-thin mustache, like Adolphe Menjou in all those 1930s backstage musicals.
“Who?” he says. “Why, you, of course.” Then he calls Ziegfeld and puts me in the Follies.
In reality, Irving Fish is a gargoyle with a lint-colored toupee that sits on his head like a nest. He looks like someone you’d meet under a bridge asking you to solve three riddles.
He doesn’t look up when I come in, but instead reaches into a drawer and flops a blood-pressure monitor onto his desk. Then, without so much as a glance at me, he removes his shirt, revealing the body of a god. Unfortunately for Irving, that god is Buddha. He has the lumpen blobbiness of a half-melted snowman. As he straps the monitor on his arm he says, “So?”
“I’m Edward Za—”
“We’ve already got an Edward,” he says. “You’ll need to be somebody else. How about Alan? I had an aunt once named Alan.”
“I’m not sure I—”
“So what’s your story, Alan?” he says, still not looking at me. “You banging my client?”
“You mean Kelly?”
“No, four-time Tony Award winner Gwen Verdon.”
“Uh, no,” I say, less heterosexually than I would have liked.
“Why? You a pansy?”
I don’t dare reach into the grab bag that is my sexuality for fear of what I might pull out, so I simply say, “We used to date.”
“Type?”
“Gosh, I don’t know. I kind of like blue-eyed blondes.”
“No, you germ,” he says, pumping the monitor. “Do. You. Type?”
“Oh. A little.”
“Shorthand?”
“No.”
“Keypad?”
“Maybe.”
“Maybe?”
“I don’t know what that is.”
He examines the gauge, scowling at the results. “I’ll take that as a no.”
“I’m a very good speller.”
“Excellent. You can represent us in the bee.”
“I meant for filing and—”
“Working pulse?”
“I beg your pardon?”
He gives me a look that’s equally malevolent and condescending, Rasputin teaching day care. “Does oxygenated blood empty out of your heart, course through your veins, deposit carbon dioxide in your lungs, which you then expel into the air?”
“Uh…yeah.”
“Good. You can start right now by perambulating your body downstairs to get me a Fresca.”
I learn very quickly why Irving Fish can’t keep an assistant. As valedictorian of the Roy Cohn School of Charm, he oozes into the office every morning with all the vigor of an oil slick, the plants in the reception area wilting and dying as he passes. It’s obvious he hates his job, his life, and, most of all, me.
And rightly so. I am a clerical disaster. Monks callig-raphing illuminated manuscripts worked quicker. A simple cover letter can take me the better part of the morning. Luckily, Irving’s clients don’t work too much. Famed for having told Meryl Streep she should get her nose fixed, Irving specializes in those who are either on their way up or on their way down, the former dumping him as soon as they hit it big, the latter clinging to him as their careers circle the drain. He’s created an entire cottage industry representing stars who are forgotten but not gone, ex–movie queens who play Mame and Dolly in melody tents all over the country.
What’s worse, I have to fill in for the receptionist, a high-haired girl from Staten Island who dials the phone with a pencil so she doesn’t break a nail. She takes so many breaks I begin to wonder whether she suffers from a chronic bladder infection.
I dread these moments most of all, gaping at the phone like I’m a transplanted aborigine: Ooh, the blinking lights of your magical talking machine frighten and confuse me. Please give me an errand so I may go on walkabout. One day I accidentally disconnect the artistic director of Playwrights Horizons and Irving throws a paperweight at me, narrowly missing my head and shattering a framed photo of Martha Raye on the wall.
“My goddess,” my mother says when I call to complain. (I figure, with all the long-distance calls the agency makes, no one will notice a few to Sedona, the latest stop on her Magical Mystery Tour. Suffice it to say her spiritual quest has greatly enhanced Natie’s stamp collection, such a Nudelman thing to collect.) “Why would you manifest that?”
“What are you talking about? I didn’t want him to—”
“Edward, he aimed for your head. Don’t you see what that means?”
“He’s a homicidal maniac?”
“No. You’re so desperate to open your mind, you willed this Irving person to do it for you.”
“Oh, Mother…”
“I’m serious. If you don’t find a spiritual outlet you could end up manifesting an aneurysm or a brain tumor. I know you think I’m crazy, but I’m not the one getting paperweights thrown at me, am I?”
“No, you’re the one in the desert trying to contact aliens.”
“Zoozook isn’t an alien; he’s a Pleiadian star being.”
She says it like everyone lives in a teepee on an abandoned ranch in Sedona so they can listen to the hallucinations of a Utah housewife who hears the voice of a five-thousand-year-old Pleiadian star being whenever she turns on her microwave.
“You’re just like your father,” my mother says. “So earthbound. You really should come to Sedona and experience the healing energies of the vortexes.”
She means vortices.
“New York is sucking your soul dry,” she adds.
She’s got a point. There’s a big, Juilliard-sized vacuum in my life, and working as an assistant to the Prince of Darkness certainly isn’t going to fill it. But how am I ever going to achieve a success large enough to redeem such an enormous failure?
Naturally, Natie sees my employment as an opportunity for ill-gotten gains. “For Chrissake, you’re his assistant,” he says. “You pick up the phone, you say you’re calling for Irv, and you can go to any audition you want.”
But the mere thought of auditioning gives me gastric reflux. I compare my résumé, which sucks even when it’s padded, with the hundreds that come across my desk, and I can’t conceive of competing against actors who have more to show for their careers than a summer spent as Chuckles the Woodchuck.
Still, I can’t help thinking I sound pretty good singing along with the London cast album of Les Misérables, which is coming to Broadway next season. I mean, it’s not like I’d expect to get a part, but surely I’m good enough for the chorus, right? Or maybe an understudy. One vocal coach in particular crops up on the better musical theater résumés, so, armed with a spiffy new Walkman-sized tape recorder, I spend fifty bucks for a lesson with Morgan Firestone, who’s responsible for Mandy Patinkin’s voice, though not the part that sounds like musical sinusitis. I choose the song I think of as my personal anthem: “Corner of the Sky” from Pippin.
I’ve got to be where my spirit can run free,
Got to find my corner of the sky.
After my particularly heartfelt rendition, Firestone looks up from the piano and says, “That wasn’t bad, but you smile too much for Les Miz.”
It’s not my fault. Two and a half years of orthodontics couldn’t eradicate an overbite, which, to be fair, was so servere to start with I could’ve eaten apples through a picket fence. The photographer who took my head shots said I have a mouth “built for smiling.” I originally took it as a compliment, like I have a congenital capacity for happiness, but, after being called too jazz hands for Juilliard, I worry it means I’m just a lightweight. Of course, this is the same photographer who rendered me virtually unrecognizable by slathering too much foundation on my face. When Irving noticed the shot on my desk one day, he said I looked like I should be down on one knee singing “Mammy.”
No, I can’t audition for Les Miz or anything else. Eve
rything about me is wrong, wrong, wrong. My spirit doesn’t run free; it runs into brick walls. I have the emotional depth of a Very Special Episode of Growing Pains. If I were a river, I’d be shallow enough to cross without rolling up your pants.
I need help.
That’s why I accept Willow’s invitation to join her at a free, introductory consciousness-raising session with EGG, the Enlightened Growth Group. Following the lone algebraic equation I remember—if a = b and b = c, then a = c—I figure that since Willow is both a gifted actor and an EGG practitioner, maybe it’ll help my acting, too.
The session takes place in a meeting room at the Sheraton, a rather bland environment for a psychological breakthrough, but I’m determined to keep an open mind. After all, I don’t want to manifest an aneurysm or a brain tumor.
There are hundreds of us assembled on those chairs that connect so you’re sitting closer to a stranger than you’d like. A lot of the people seem to know one another, judging from the overlong hugs and soulful stares. As a group of Growth Facilitators motions us to our seats, Willow turns to me with the panicked look of someone who just remembered she left the water running. With a child in the tub.
“Did you pee?” she says.
“You mean just now? No, I’m continent, thank you.”
“I mean—”
She’s interrupted by an explosion of applause as a team of radiantly happy people takes the stage, led by a middle-aged man with a gleaming cue-ball head and a glassy-eyed expression. He wears a collarless Indian shirt, which marks him as a Spiritual Person. He joins in the applause and soon we’re all clapping rhythmically. For five minutes.
It’s a funny thing about five minutes. If you’re running five minutes late, it speeds right by; but try clapping rhythmically for longer than thirty seconds and the novelty wears off fast.
The leader motions us to sit down, then stares at us so long I find myself nostalgic for the clapping. Finally he says, “I see you.”
“I see you,” responds the crowd, or at least those who know what the hell’s going on.