by Marc Acito
Meanwhile, to add insult to insanity, my father sends me an article about the returns on the investment in education. Apparently, by middle age physicians earn a sixteen percent return on the money they spent on school, surgeons eighteen, lawyers twenty-three percent, and businessmen twenty-six percent.
He underlines that last one.
Days become nights and nights days. I spend all my time in the private tree house of my loft bed, subsisting on cereal and Agatha Christie mysteries. I have agitated, looping dreams where I wake up sweaty and panicked: I’m in high school and have forgotten to go to biology for a semester, and now I’ll never graduate; my teeth disintegrate into powder and fall out of my mouth; I’m chased by an angry mob until I fall off a cliff and hang on by the tips of my fingers.
I’m in Sedona. Everywhere I turn I see jagged mountains so red they look like they’ve been left outside to rust, a Martian landscape filled with hundreds of teepees. I approach one of them looking for my mother, but I can’t find the way in. I circle it, rubbing my hands along the leather, searching for the opening, but none of the flaps gives way.
“Mom?” I cry. “Where are you?”
I can hear her voice calling me—“Edward?”—but I can’t find her. Is she in this teepee? Or the next one? Or the next?
“Mom?”
“Edward?”
“Mom?”
“Edward?”
“Edward!”
I open my eyes, squinting to adjust to the light, and there she is, her mane of hair backlit like a halo.
Paula.
She clacks across the hardwood floor and throws open the shade, a shaft of white-hot daylight piercing the gloom. I recoil like a vampire.
“Rise and shine, rise and shine!” she singsongs, suddenly Southern.
I roll over.
“Oh, come on,” she says. “You know the line.”
I do. It’s from The Glass Menagerie. Paula and I played mother and son my sophomore year of high school.
“I’ll rise but I won’t shine,” I mutter.
“Splendid,” Paula says. “Now suit the action to the word.”
I prop myself up on my elbows to get a better look. Her fleshy body is poured into a yellow sundress the color of an Easter peep.
“Yikes,” I say, shielding my eyes. “Turn off your dress.”
She smiles. “Fuck you very much.”
I flop back on my pillow. “How’d you get in?”
“Willow loaned me her keys. We had lunch and she said you hadn’t left the house.”
“Did she say why?”
“If she did, I couldn’t tell. You know Willow.” She drums her hands on the side of my bed. “Now, up. Stop stalling.”
“I can’t.”
“You can and you will. We’re going to see Barbara Cook.”
“The singer?” I ask.
“No, the bag lady. Of course Barbara Cook the singer. Her one-woman show is in previews at the Ambassador. We’re going to second-act the matinee.”
“I don’t know,” I say, draping myself consumptively off the side of the bed.
Paula puts her hands on her hips, never a good sign. “Don’t make me climb up that ladder in heels.”
“We haven’t second-acted since that time we got kicked out of Sunday in the Park with George.”
“Please. That was ages ago.”
I glance at the window. So much sunshine. Do I risk being seen?
“I don’t think so.”
Paula stomps her tiny foot in frustration. “What is going on? Ever since you left Juilliard you’ve been so distant. You don’t return my calls. You don’t come see my shows.” She sniffs back her emotion. “Don’t you want to be friends anymore?”
“Of course I do.”
“Then why won’t you come?”
I look at my old friend, her moonbeam skin so pale it’s as if she’d bleed milk. Keeping a secret from her is almost physically painful.
Okay, maybe if I wear a hat.
The key to successful second-acting is to blend in with the intermission crowd, which isn’t easy when one of you is wearing a battered Sinatra fedora and the other resembles a well-fed canary. It’s even more difficult when one of you is ranting about the faculty of the finest drama school in the country.
“I’ve lost nine goddamned pounds,” Paula says, “and still they’re on my ass to lose weight, which, considering the size of my ass, is a lot of ground to cover.” She fans herself with her Playbill, which is actually from Starlight Express, but the ad on the back is the same. “I’ve done everything I can, positively everything—taking those ridiculous pills, eating that wretched soup—and all it did was turn me into a jittering, farting madwoman. I tell you, Edward, there’s just no pleasing them. And now, with The Music Man? canceled and Marcus so depressed, I find dieting nearly impossible.”
“What?” I say. “You canceled The Music Man?”
“Didn’t I tell you? It just imploded. There are only two actors left who are even speaking to Marcus. I feel so sorry for him. He never should have tried to direct.” She shakes her head with pity. “If he could just find a role worthy of his talent.”
The nutty scent of a hot-pretzel vendor wafts by. “C’mon,” she says. “Let’s go in before I accost that pretzel man.”
As the rest of the audience returns to their seats, we see that we’re in luck, having our choice of empty rows in the back of the orchestra. While I’m glad to have my pick of seats, it also makes me mad. The choo-choo musical is selling out, but you can’t fill a theater to see a Broadway legend, the woman who originated the role of Marian in The Music Man thirty years ago, the woman who sang the E flat above high C in “Glitter and Be Gay” eight times a week in the original production of Candide.
Candide. Of course. As we slip into a pair of seats on the aisle, I pull Doug’s postcard out of my pocket. It’s not like I carry it around with me everywhere; it just so happens that Doug got home last night and I’m going out to Jersey City tonight.
I look at the card.
P.S. Have you read? Made me think of you.
That must be it. Candide‘s a perfect book for a cruise—short, funny, and full of traveling. And I’d like to think I’m a Candide-like figure, a plucky innocent making his way in this less than the best of all possible worlds.
I’m imagining the look of delight on Doug’s face (“Man, how did you guess? Now take off my clothes with your teeth”) when a voice behind us says:
“Can I see your tickets, please?”
Busted. Damn. It must be the fedora.
I turn to face the usher, ready to play “I thought you had the tickets” with Paula.
“Gotcha!” Mrs. Fiamma says, laughing like a lawn mower that won’t start.
“Wh-what are you doing here?”
“I wanted to see Barbara Cook, too.” She gives me a little punch in the shoulder. “Enjoy the show.”
She waddles away as the lights dim.
The matinee audience applauds arthritically as Barbara Cook enters. She’s a large blonde going on sixty, wearing an outfit that makes her look like a sequined washing machine. But she exudes an irresistible farm-girl friendliness, as if she were about to milk the piano.
“Now, you’ve gotta be about twelve years old to sing this song,” she says, a hint of honeysuckle in her accent. “But I first performed it in the City Center revival of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel back in 19”—she makes a joke of covering her mouth with her hand—“so you’ll just have to use your imagination.”
She clears her throat, tosses her head, and begins to sing:
His name is Mister Snow,
And an upstanding man is he…
In an instant the years and pounds vanish. Without so much as a change in lighting, Cook transforms herself into a not-so-sharp lass in love with a herring fisherman, her clear, unencumbered soprano shining like the morning sun. Even though she has an operatic technique, there’s nothing fruity or fussy about her sound. It
’s a voice you could imagine hearing through a screen door on a summer night—that is, assuming you had a freakishly talented neighbor.
Her performance is a revelation. I’ve always thought of this song as a silly throwaway, but Cook finds wit and warmth where I didn’t think it possible. When she complains about Mister Snow’s clothes smelling of fish the audience laughs as if they‘d never heard it before, even though many of them are old enough to have heard it the first time. Then, as if reaching a clearing in the woods, she sings the chorus, drinking in the word home like it was springwater, sharing a vision of happiness so sublime I don’t want the song ever to end. It’s sheer theater magic—no laser light show, no flying scenery—just an actor with words and melody.
It’s like going to heaven.
The magic moments keep coming, songs that are miniature dramas: the frantic “Vanilla Ice Cream” from She Loves Me topped with a high B like it’s nothing; the heartbreaking “Losing My Mind” from Follies, a song that always makes me think of Doug.
I want you so,
It’s like I’m losing my mind…
Cook pours a lifetime of struggle and disappointment into the number—a stalled career, a failed marriage, depression, alcoholism, obesity—it’s all there for us to see. She opens her heart to the audience, saying, Come on in; it’ll be less lonely if we share this pain, and I realize she’s doing the exact opposite of what the faculty wanted me to do at Juilliard. Acting in a play is like living in a terrarium—it looks like nature, but it isn’t. There’s a glass wall separating you from the real world. With her diamond-sharp voice, Cook cuts an audience-sized hole in that wall until it’s just her and us and the music.
A holy trinity.
Paula and I applaud with abandon, our arms stretching for Cook in a hug that can’t possibly reach, our hands cymbaling together, refusing to let up until she does an encore. And, strangely enough, I find myself thinking about Hung. Not in an I-want-you-so-it’s-like-I’m-losing-my-mind way, but because he would so love this. Unreservedly. Enthusiastically. Homosexually.
“Fuck ’em,” Paula says.
“What?”
“The faculty. Fuck ’em.” She gestures at Cook as she leaves the stage. “Look at her. Who gives a shit if she’s fat? Look at what she can do. She doesn’t let it stop her. It’s like Marcus says—if you’re an artist, create art. Don’t sit around waiting for someone to give you permission.”
Cook reenters and heads for the bend of the piano. Instead of stopping there, however, she places her microphone on the lid and crosses down to the apron of the stage. A murmur runs through the crowd as some of us realize what she’s about to do, that she’s going to sing her encore without a mike. As the pianist plays an intro, Cook’s friendly face spreads into a wide smile, as if to say, Let me show you how we did it in the old days, and I feel a shimmer of excitement. I’ve never heard an unamplified voice in a Broadway theater.
She sings “Till There Was You.”
Paula grips my hand in hers, her mouth disappearing into a taut, narrow line, her eyes welling. Cook’s voice rings throughout the auditorium, entirely audible even on the softest notes. She sings directly to us, simultaneously blessing us while offering a prayer of thanks. We are the you of the title. The fact that there’s no mike makes it that much more personal.
There was love all around
But I never heard it singing…
And suddenly it’s the summer I’m fourteen, and I’m singing those words, harmonizing with the Marian, a senior who went off to study at the New England Conservatory of Music. Every night, when I came out for my curtain call, the audience sounded like a sonic boom, a wave of energy so strong I vowed right then and there that I would make my life in the theater.
I wish I could always feel the way I did during the curtain call of my high school musical.
Paula and I exit the theater in silence, only to be assaulted by the blaring of horns, the city asserting its ruthless authority. I look east on Forty-ninth Street and see a wall of traffic. Broadway is completely stuck, immobile. Cars fill the intersection, blocking the westbound Forty-ninth Street traffic. Across Broadway sits a trapped ambulance, its siren wailing for the life it can’t save.
There’s someone in that ambulance, I think. A person in crisis, hanging on to life by a thread. Someone like Eddie Sanders.
And no one’s doing a damn thing about it.
Horns bray. Drivers shake their fists and scream. And still the siren wails and wails.
“We’ve got to help,” I say.
“What can we do?” Paula asks. “It’s a parking lot.”
I look out at the sea of vehicles, each with no more than a foot between them. “We’ll get them each to move a little,” I say.
“What?”
“Baby steps,” I say. “We do enough of those and pretty soon we’ve gotten somewhere.”
Paula’s mouth spreads into a full curtain-up-light-the-lights smile, as if to say, Welcome back, Edward; we’ve missed you.
I step out into traffic, zigzagging through the cars to the other side of Broadway, Paula clacking behind me. I tap on the window of the first car blocking the intersection.
“We need to clear a space for this ambulance,” I say. “Would you back up about six inches? We’ll tell you when to stop.”
To my surprise the driver doesn’t hesitate; nor does the next one or the next. By getting the cars at the front of the intersection to creep forward and the ones at the rear to inch back, we’re able, car by car by car, to clear a space. A couple of Latino guys crossing the street see what we’re doing and join in, speeding up the process. I feel my spirits lift higher and higher as Broadway opens up before us, Moses parting the Red Sea. We’re actually making this happen. In a city of strangers.
Within minutes the ambulance crosses Broadway. Paula and I hug each other, high-five the Latino guys, and wave triumphantly at the driver as he passes. Some onlookers even applaud.
Then I notice a man standing on the corner, watching. He’s a good-looking guy, clean-cut in a wholesome Mormon way: hair cut above the ears, white dress shirt, tan trench coat. The kind of guy you’d imagine would have a soap opera name like Tanner or Blake.
His eyes lock with mine in that unmistakably laser-focused way that gay men do. For the briefest of moments we see each other. Really see each other. An EGG moment. Then I glance down at his feet and see that he’s wearing snub-nosed black Oxford shoes with white socks.
Cop shoes.
Thirty-three
Okay, maybe I’m being paranoid. That can happen at my age. Perfectly normal people can suddenly turn schizophrenic in their early twenties. Just like that.
Great. I’m either mentally ill or going to jail.
I turn and begin walking down Forty-ninth Street.
“Where are you going?” Paula asks.
I have no idea. I’m just hoping that a meteorite will enter the earth’s atmosphere and crash into this Tanner or Blake person, knocking him unconscious while I figure out what to do next.
I speed up, Paula straggling behind me.
Then I hear bells. Playing “There’s No Business Like Show Business.”
The sound comes from a small stone church with a banner reading ST. MALACHY‘S CATHOLIC CHURCH. THE ACTORS’ CHAPEL. The Actors’ Chapel? I must have passed it a thousand times and never noticed, having been too preoccupied looking at the Eugene O’Neill across the street.
A church. I can seek sanctuary. Assuming churches still do that.
I peer over my shoulder and see the fed gaining on me. “Edward, slow down,” Paula says.
The steps of the church are just a few feet away.
“Edward!”
Paula grabs my sleeve.
I turn and there he is. Hair Above His Ears and White Socks. He furrows his brow.
“Excuse me,” he says, “are you…”
He pauses, just to toy with me, like Javert in Les Misérables. Sadistic bastard. I square my shoulders, d
etermined to admit who I am with all the resolve of Jean Valjean. Except I won’t screech it on a high B natural.
“…the Party Monster?”
I hear someone who sounds just like me say, “Uh, yes.”
He hands me his Barbara Cook Playbill and asks for an autograph.
After he’s gone, I slump on the stone steps, burying my sweaty face in my sweaty palms. “I thought for sure that was it,” I mutter.
“What are you talking about?” Paula says. “What’s wrong?”
I have to tell her. I don’t want to, but I can’t keep it in anymore.
“Let’s go inside where it’s cool,” I say. And where she can’t yell.
Two hours later my arm is still sore from where Paula punched me. Repeatedly. I’ve never known her to be violent, but then again, I’ve never implicated her in a federal crime before.
So I’m particularly happy to see Doug, and not just because he’s wearing a pair of sweatpants without the cumbersome bother of underwear.
As always, there’s something of the satyr about him, like he’s about to perch on a tree stump and play panpipes. I wouldn’t be surprised to find a pair of horns hidden in his cowlicky hair. He wears a shell choker around his neck, and a tank top reading IT’S BETTER IN THE BAHAMAS. With his umbered skin he looks like he’s been bronzed as a keepsake.
He grips me by the shoulders. “Man, it’s good to see you.”
Whatever weirdness there was between us last fall seems to have melted away like the winter frost. I come in, stepping past a scorched spot on the living room carpet. Doug explains that they had a coming-home party and Napalm set the couch on fire. Then, grabbing a six-pack of Bud tallboys from the fridge, we head down the hall to his room.
We’ve just reached the door when Vernon appears.
“Yo, Junior,” he says to Doug. “That Zebra chick is on the phone.”
“Zee-ba,” Doug says.