Attack of the Theater People

by Marc Acito

  This is where I want to be.

  Gavin and I sit on the steps to the mezzanine stuffing inserts into Playbills, Gavin making bridges with his long, skinny legs, like he’s doing yoga. I explain to him that this guy I’ve been seeing is cheating on me, and would he be willing to use his lipreading skills to help me spy? I feel bad lying to him, but I can’t risk him telling Paula about my insider trading. “We’ll get to wear disguises,” I say, hoping it all sounds like a madcap lark.

  “When?”

  “Saturday night.”

  He frowns.

  “What?” I say. “Will your boyfriend mind?”

  “No, he works weekends, too. That’s the problem. I’m supposed to work.” He tosses his hair, the way pretty girls do. “I’ll try to get a sub. Hey, that reminds me, do you want to get on the list?” He looks down. “I, uh, saw in the paper that you lost your job.”

  I lean over so I can see him. “That’d be great.”

  He smiles. What a nice face he has, so sweet, yet melancholy. “Most of the ushers are old ladies,” he says, “but, for some reason the subs are gay guys. And, well, lately we’ve been short.”

  The reason hovers in the air between us.

  He writes a number on the back of an insert. “Call the union and ask for Hela. Tell her I recommended you.”

  Sensing an opportunity for Natie to earn back Paula’s money, I ask Gavin if my roommate could do it, too.

  “You mean the little guy helping Paula make money?”

  Lose money, but why argue semantics?

  “Sure,” he says. “He’s gay, right?”

  “Yes,” I say.

  Serves him right.

  I come home to find Willow curled up on my couch, all snuggly in an oversize mohair sweater and paisley leggings as she talks on the phone. She waves like there’s nothing unusual about her being here. “Oh, he just walked in,” she says. “Well, it was great talking to you, Joy. Yeah, namaste to you, too.” She hands me the phone. “It’s your mother.”

  My mother’s name is Barbara.

  “Mom?”

  “Hello, dear one.”

  “Who’s Joy?”

  “I am,” she says.

  “You changed your name?”

  “I have your father to thank for it, which isn’t something you hear me say every day. When you told me he was getting married again, I thought, ‘Why am I still carrying this identity around with me? Who’s Barbara Zanni? She’s one of those legless suburban mothers you only see waving from the window of a station wagon as she ferries her children around.’”

  “You never ferried us anywhere,” I say. “You sat in the house with the shades drawn, smoking.”

  “That’s because I was miscast in my life as a suburban mother. And I did so ferry you. You just remember the bad parts.”

  Actually, I remember a childhood spent in front of the TV imagining myself trading quips with Merv Griffin.

  She continues: “So I thought to myself, ‘Who am I? What am I? I’m Joy! I’m Joy!’”

  “Joy Zanni?” I say.

  “No, your father’s name no longer serves. But neither does my father’s name. I was just telling Willow, women are property in this culture. That’s why they call them surnames.”

  One advantage of living far away from your mother is that you can roll your eyes at her as much as you want.

  “Okay,” I say, “so what’s your new last name?”

  “Shapeshifter.”

  “That’s not a name.”

  “It is for the native people.”

  “But you’re Polish.”

  “This lifetime,” she says. “In the past I was a shaman.”

  No one ever does anything ordinary in a past life. In past lives, believers always kneel and weep at the feet of the crucified Jesus or have their hearts yanked out by Aztec priests in a ritual sacrifice. You never hear about someone being a medieval serf sleeping in a mud hut with goats and pigs, then dying of cholera.

  “That’s what your driver’s license says—Joy Shapeshifter?”

  “Yes. I was gifted it by Zoozook.”

  “Can you give it back?”

  “Don’t be fresh. People come from all over to hear Zoozook’s teachings. Why, just the other day…”

  And she’s off, sharing the mystical insights of a five-thousand-year-old Pleiadian star being as channeled by Odeen Huckins, the former Utah housewife who is now so disconnected from the earth plane her acolytes push her around the desert compound in a wheelbarrow. I mm-hmm and uh-huh her, but my mind drifts—not to the cosmos, but to my own surreal life. It’s official, I think. I’m an orphan.

  “Edward, are you listening?” she says. “What Zoozook is trying to tell us is that we’re all star beings. When the universe first began it exploded into an infinite number of atoms. And that’s all we are—people, plants, furniture, cars—everything is starlight. There is no you. No me. No son. No mother.”

  Barbara.

  I mean Joy.

  Whatever.

  I hang up, deflated. Every good-bye with my mother is the first good-bye, a searing reminder of the day she walked out of our house in Wallingford and left on her magical mystery tour. I try to shake off the feeling by turning my attention to Willow, who seems positively logical by comparison.

  “I hope you don’t mind me picking up your phone,” she says, “but I was sitting here—actually, I was sitting there—and it feels weird when someone talks on your answering machine like you’re not there but you really are—well, you weren’t, but I was. So I picked up and this woman says, ‘Who’s this?’ and I’m like, ‘Willow, who’s this?’ and she says, ‘Edward’s mom,’ and I’m like, ‘Oh, my God, I love Edward’s mom,’ so, naturally we got to talking about your spiritual health.”

  Naturally.

  “She said it was no accident that I’m moving in.”

  “Whoa, wait, what?”

  “Didn’t I tell you? I had to get away from Paula and Marcus. It’s like Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf over there.”

  “What happened?”

  Willow rises and scoops up a set of darts from a cup. To his immense pride, Natie recently designed a dartboard made up entirely of prime numbers, creating a complicated scoring system that always seems to favor him. Willow throws a dart, missing the board by at least a foot. “Paula started taking these herbal diet pills that this friend of hers sells over the phone—which is really sad, because—well, I don’t know what’s in them, but they make her like wooh—and, c’mon, I left the apartment unlocked, what, two or three times, and she went—well, you understand, right?”

  Actually, no. Willow always sounds like she’s translating into Chinese and back again.

  She throws another dart at the wall. “And Marcus! Well, all I’ve got to say is…really, it’s kind of sad, if you think about it. He should be playing kings, not trying to…and I don’t care if Stanislavski did rehearse The Cherry Orchard for seven months; I still see no reason why we should jog around the reservoir at eleven o’clock at night in February.”

  A third dart lands in the wall.

  “Y’know, the object of the game is to hit the board,” I say.

  “Anyone can do that,” she says, tossing a fourth. “Look, I’ve almost got the Big Dipper.”

  I give up. “Where’s Natie?”

  “He’s out buying bolts to install my hammock. Isn’t that thoughtful? He’s just about the most considerate, selfless person I’ve met in my whole life.”

  “You sure we’re talking about the same guy? Red hair? A little cross-eyed?”

  “When I told him I needed a place to stay, he didn’t hesitate. Of course, I’ll pay a third of the rent. Let’s see, $600 split three ways…”

  “It’s $400.”

  “What? How do you get $400 when you divide $600 three ways?”

  “No, the rent is $400.”

  “Each? You’re paying $1,200 to live here?”

  I swear, talking to Willow is like knitt
ing a sweater out of mashed potatoes.

  “The. Rent. Is. Four. Hundred. Total.”

  “Oh,” she says. “I could have sworn Nathan said it was $600.”

  I clear a spot on Sweeney Todd’s chair. “Welcome to my life.”

  “Oh, there was another call, too,” she says. “Some girl screamed, ‘Fuckwad,’ and hung up.”

  One of the things I learned in high school is that when you impersonate a priest you are rendered both conspicuous and invisible; whether I was buying beer or laundering money, all anyone ever saw was the collar. Following this crooked line of reasoning, a Hasidic rabbi in a hat with a beard and curls looks pretty much like any other.

  So Saturday night, two Hasidic rabbis walk into a bar, which sounds like the setup for a joke. (Two Hasidic rabbis walk into a bar. And the bartender says, “Why is this night different from all other nights?”)

  The Orthodox disguise was my idea. Not only does it provide a way for me and Gavin to watch Chad and Dagmar without being recognized; it also ensures that we can do it without That Girl tagging along. With our black fedoras pulled down low, we look like kosher gangsters.

  Unfortunately, my only contact with Hasidic Jews comes from the time Paula and I went to 47th Street Photo to buy a camera and discovered it’s run entirely by men with curls like telephone cords. When an announcement came over the PA with a call for Shlomo, three guys reached for the phone. With only the vaguest idea of how Hasidic Jews talk, I go for a generalized shtetl-speak, which I learned when I played the tailor Motel Kamzoil in Fiddler on the Roof in the eighth grade.

  “Ve had a bris around the corner,” I tell the hostess at Caprice. “Now ve’re feeling a little peckish.”

  “I’m sorry,” she says in a tone that indicates she isn’t. “We don’t have any tables until ten o’clock.”

  “Oy,” I say. “Then ve’ll just sit at the bar and have a little glass tea.”

  This is all part of my plan. Assuming Chad and Dagmar are seated in Chad’s regular spot, we can easily watch them from the bar without having to buy a meal I can’t afford. We go to the bar, which is full of malnourished women and the men who love them, and order wine served in glasses the size of fishbowls. I’m glad they’re so large, because we’re going to need to make them last. The only reason I can afford them is because my rent went down.

  I look around the room, gauging the other patrons’ reactions to us. Some cast curious glances our way, but none of them has the smirk of someone suspecting a practical joke. They all seem to think we are who we appear to be, and I once again relish the power that comes from acting behind a mask, of truly convincing someone you are another person. It makes me feel ready to live in the scene. One of the biggest problems I had at Juilliard was “playing the outcome,” somehow telegraphing to the audience with body language that I knew how the scene was going to turn out, as opposed to seeming like a real person who has no idea what will happen. “Acting is like tennis,” Marian Seldes would say. “You show up with your technique, but you don’t know what the other actor is going to do.”

  Here at Caprice, I truly have no idea what will happen, and, my apprehension aside, I feel giddy at the sensation. This is what acting is supposed to feel like. Maybe Juilliard should hold classes in public places instead of those gray, windowless rooms. I imagine a whole new curriculum in which actors are taught to act out in the world before bringing those skills into the classroom. They could call it the Zanni Method.

  Suddenly the hostess is in our faces.

  “Excuse me, Rabbis,” she says. “We can seat you now.”

  “Vot?”

  “We’ve had a cancellation.”

  I suddenly wish I knew how the scene will end.

  Twenty-eight

  “Great,” Gavin says. “I’m hungry.”

  I can’t very well tell him I have no money in front of the hostess, so I find myself skulking through the dining room while I sift through the muck in my brain for a nugget of an idea.

  We’re seated at an undesirable table in the middle of the room, the other diners wedging us in on all sides, as if we were performing Yiddish theater-in-the-round. As God’s chosen people, however, we’re blessed with an un-obstructed view of Chad’s regular table, which sits empty, awaiting his arrival.

  I hope.

  While I undo my napkin origami, Gavin scans the menu, his bulbous eyes widening to make him look even more like a koi.

  “They must charge by the ingredient,” he says.

  I open my menu and see that the entrées cost more than a pair of Reeboks.

  I’ve got to tell him, but I’m worried the other diners might overhear me. Then I realize that I don’t need to make any sound for Gavin to understand me.

  This is so embarrassing, I mouth, but I only had enough money to pay for drinks.

  Gavin smiles. “That’s okay. We can put it on my credit card.”

  Are you sure? I’ll totally pay you back.

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  Why don’t we just do appetizers? Otherwise I’ll have to donate plasma.

  “You can’t,” he says. “You’re gay.”

  The weedy woman at the next table flinches, toppling her artfully constructed wigwam of food.

  “You’re uh, talking a little loud,” I say.

  While homosexuals and Hasidim are not uncommon on the island of Manhattan, you’d be hard-pressed to find them at the same table. Forget the commandments; the haircut alone is a deal breaker.

  I’m about to ask why gay people can’t give blood when I realize the answer, which makes me feel like a leper. It’s only a matter of time before we have to wear bells around our necks.

  “So,” I say, “how’s the show coming?”

  He sighs. “Have you ever eaten one of those hot dogs they sell on the street?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s worse. Marcus is impossible. Now he’s in a big feud with Angelo.”

  “Who?”

  “Angelo. You know.”

  “Oh, of course. It just sounds funny not calling him Father.”

  “It would sound funny if I did.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s one thing to call your boyfriend daddy….”

  “WHAT?”

  “Didn’t you know?”

  “No. You’re dating a priest?”

  The man at the next table chokes on his bowl of wine.

  “I don’t get it,” I say, lowering my voice. “Isn’t that breaking a commandment or something?”

  “Why? He’s not coveting his neighbor’s wife.”

  “But priests are supposed to be celibate.”

  “Technically he is. Celibacy is the renunciation of marriage.”

  “I thought it meant you couldn’t have sex.”

  “Only by extension. Catholics aren’t supposed to have sex outside of marriage.”

  I shouldn’t be surprised. Catholicism is the ultimate loophole religion (sin, confess, repeat), so it makes sense that a priest would know better than anyone how to work the angles. Still, when you go to confession and say, “Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned,” you don’t expect him to say, “So, who hasn’t?”

  Gavin goes on to explain, without a whiff of irony, that Angelo considers Marcus’s refusal to pay for the rights to The Music Man a violation of “Thou shalt not steal.” He’s interrupted, however, by the arrival of Dagmar and Chad.

  “That’s him,” I say, pointing with my bearded chin.

  Gavin cranes his slender neck to see. “He’s cheating on you with a woman?”

  I must confess that I hadn’t thought how I was going to explain all this to Gavin, particularly if Dagmar starts ranting about my past misdeeds and Chad admits my current ones. Naturally Gavin will tell Angelo, who’ll tell Paula, who’ll be furious with me for breaking the law. Not to mention implicating her.

  My vision of disaster is interrupted by the waiter, an animated actor type currently starring in a one-man extravaganza called Our Spe
cials Tonight.

  Polenta! The Musical.

  “I’ll have the wood-fired shrimp in crab sauce,” Gavin says.

  “Oh…kay,” Our Specials Tonight says. “And you, sir?”

  “I’ll hev the Black Forest ham vit goat cheese.”

  His eyebrows descend under the weight of heavy skepticism. “Really?”

  “Yeah,” I say, giving him the evil eye. “You gotta problem vit that?”

  “No, no,” he says. He backs away as if I might explode.

  “Why do you think he looked at us like that?” Gavin asks.

  I shrug Hebraically, like a Catskills comic.

  I glance over my shoulder at Dagmar and Chad, who are scanning their menus. “So what are they saying?”

  Gavin peers across the room. “He’s telling her the veal is excellent. She says she’s a vegetarian.”

  “So was Hitler.”

  He then relates a banal litany of Dagmar’s various food allergies and her boneheaded theories on food combining. Gavin narrates as they swap autobiographies, the way people do when they’re getting to know each other, the sun shining bright on Chad’s old Kentucky home, Dagmar blessing her Austrian homeland forever. Eventually, while we’re dismantling the sculpture of our appetizers, Gavin says, “Oh, wait. Chad’s saying how disappointed he was when you got in trouble, that he didn’t know you that well, but he thought of you as someone he could mentor. Just like a rich, wide man mentored him.”

  “Rich Whiteman?”

  “Yeah, he’s saying something about a role model, an inspiration. I don’t know; I can’t tell—he’s got bread in his mouth. Hang on. He’s swallowing; he’s leaning in to talk to her; he’s putting his hand on hers; he’s saying: ‘How would you like to be a spy?’”

  The rest comes in a blur: “‘Call me at home, no matter how late…information is the currency of democracy…Thomas fucking Jefferson…filthy fucking rich…Ronald fucking Reagan.’”