“You mean give up, don’t you?”
“You’ve been under a lot of pressure, my humble maid.”
“You mean quit, don’t you? Give up. Like the rest of our family. Just walk away. Like my brother did.”
“No, Cease. Everyone’s proud of you. I’m sure he’s looking down just beaming with—”
“That’s so fucking typical. Just like your sister. Just give up when the Big Apple tells you you’re too old and washed up. Just give up and move out west to reinvent yourself as a star. Well. Just what the hell am I gonna do now? Without him I don’t have a clue how to make it. I’ll wind up old and single, clinging to some stupid dream of being from a rich, storied family. Only we both know that’s one big lie.”
Nina looks as if she’s going to cry. I wasn’t reading her right when she put down the article from RHI. She wasn’t trying to tell me this was proof of my shot at the big time. She’s trying to tell me enough is enough. She’s putting her foot down and those furry slippers are suddenly made of steel.
Help. Nina could nix everything if she wanted to. She could call Francis right now. And in a few hours she’ll probably head down the hall to her bedroom and her other desk that has another computer. Francis will probably already have the scene up of my bashing in the big hunk’s nose. And when she sees that it’ll be goodbye red carpet.
I clench my teeth. I sit down. Put my hands in my lap. This isn’t a childish tantrum. I’m really afraid. Does she really think after everything that’s happened to us we can just leave the theater? Does my Nina really think art imitates life? What a bunch of crap. Art doesn’t imitate life. Life’s one big lie, and art is really all we have to get by on. At least that’s the way it is in the House of de Menich.
“Nina. Listen to me. I know I might have a problem with intimacy. But I’m an actor, and I don’t intend to quit now. Rex is history. Trust me, he got what he deserved. Bradley is the last boy standing, at least until Francis brings in that big star he’s been talking about. Bradley’s the sweetest boy in the world. I think we’re really gonna make some—” I stop. I don’t know which is more offensive to my Nina—all the violence or the sex that I know Francis is dying to film.
Tell her the truth, Cease.
“Yeah. I was jealous when James fell in love with Philip Van der Ebb. But not of that boy who’d stolen my brother’s heart. I was jealous of his first suitor—your sister.”
There. Let the whole crypt hear. Let the chorus sing their condemnation. Truth is, our family tragedy wouldn’t be complete without a walk-on from our beloved boy Oedipus. I unleash a fury of hurtful words until Nina says “Stop” and turns her head away. This is what happens when you don’t have a decent drama to hide behind. This is what happens when you hold that proverbial mirror up to life and see how cracked it really is—when you don’t have a character you can blame for all your real-life flaws. I look at my Nina and try to see Lady Macbeth—or even Susan B. Anthony—but see only an old woman who rubs her face with her wrinkled hands as if she’s trying to stifle tears. I just can’t keep my hands off a scab. I take a deep breath.
“You were chosen for this role, Cease, and you were chosen for reasons that go a whole lot deeper than fame.” She says it with the same solemn tone that she used after I hung up with my agent the day I got this part. One door had closed, she had said. And another had opened. I thought the new space I found myself in would be a helluva lot less weird and cryptic than the old one. I stand, but don’t dare cross the line between us.
“So, why do you want me to quit?”
“I’m scared,” she says. “I’ve lost a sister and a nephew. I can’t afford to lose…” her voice trails off. I take her hand over the imaginary threshold.
“I’m scared too, Nina. I know Francis is fucking with my head, but maybe this is the only way we can face our past.” I raise my hands above my shoulders as if I’m trying to pull down the words that might bridge the gap between us.
“I’m sorry, Nina.”
But there’s a whole lot more that needs to be said. There’s a giant secret that sits between us, a secret that’s been left unsaid for generations, and maybe the only way we can face it is on stage, the place where make-believe still makes sense. We retreat to our corners of the apartment—Nina to her roll-top desk overlooking the cloisters, and me to the farthest point west in the living room to look down on the traffic on First Avenue and that silver monolith filled with translators who might know the word for the kind of love two young people can share but most grown-ups would never really understand.
The doorbell rings, the script arrives, and like two actors tired of playing real life Nina and I rush to see what’s in store for tomorrow. I let out a sigh of relief when I read it’s a catfight with Eve. I hand over the script the way I showed Nina the scapular, and she accepts it as a peace offering. Nina’s never met Eve, but Eve’s a type we used to see a lot of when we lived on the Upper East Side.
“Eve’s just like Serena Van der Ebb.” I don’t need to ask Nina if she remembers Serena. Serena was the Queen Bee of the Upper East Side. And Serena had a brother, Phil, one of the handsomest boys at The Dayton School—the boy who broke my brother’s heart.
Have you ever been to a place as enchanting as anything you’ve seen on the silver screen? I have, and it didn’t take much of an imagination. After the car crash that killed my mother, Nina took us east and rented a cottage for us in Narragansett, near the Hamptons. I think she knew we needed a place to let go of our past before we settled into the big city. After all the trauma and heartache of losing my mother, I had my brother back, and I felt relief that I no longer had to compete with her for his attention. That cottage with all its mismatched furniture was a springboard where we studied all the tragic figures who’d save us from our all-too-real past. It was also in that place we stumbled on a secret.
I can close my eyes and still see that look of apprehension on my Nina’s face as she tucked us into separate beds each night and that same look of apprehension as she gently untangled our limbs from the same bed the next morning. I lied to Manny the talk-show host when I said my first memory was waking to the sight of a cross on the wall. My first memory was waking in my brother’s arms. My first thought was frustration—frustration that I couldn’t control those arms, feel their every sensation. It was then I started telling people he wasn’t just my brother. That he was my tutor, my bodyguard, my rock, and soon enough—with the help of Shakespeare—James de Menich became a host of characters I could love with all my heart. But he was my brother. He was three years older and had inherited the green eyes and blond hair of our mother. He had bony limbs that bronzed in the sun. I’d inherited the brown hair and dark eyes of our father, a man we’d never met.
I don’t know where this kind of love comes from. All the enmity and rivalry common to most siblings was as strange to us as the strange place we now found ourselves. The first social worker in California said this kind of bonding was common to abused children. I’m trying to remember the word she used to describe what we had…it had a clinical sound (even then, words were untrustworthy strangers my brother told me to be wary of)…it meant we were bound together, and I insisted it was in a good way, hand-in-hand, connected at the hip. It felt as if we were two drops of quicksilver from one of those old, broken thermometers—two drops that could sense each other, regroup and bond. Our bloodline was filled with loyal, sanguine siblings, he assured me as he made straight all those crooked lines in the de Menich genealogy that he became obsessed with after we’d arrived in New York.
But I can still see my brother lying on the wet rocks overlooking the Atlantic. He looked like one of those nymphs you see in a Maxfield Parrish print. If I close my eyes, I can see that gorgeous cluster of freckles on his perfect Roman nose—and I understood even if he’d never shared the great secrets of drama and fame, his beauty alone inspired me to become a performer. But share he did. James told me stories about drama in the big city. How the young and the
talented became famous overnight, how with a little luck—which we were long overdue for—we’d catch a big break and become big names on Broadway. I followed my brother’s outstretched arms to the heavens as he said “as big as Tracy and Hepburn.” I didn’t understand why our names needed to be any bigger than they were, but I was certainly ready for a name change because I hated “Cecile” and thought my mother had given it to me to make me feel old-fashioned, frail.
I could almost see the city that my brother conjured as I looked beyond those wet rocks and listened to him with my ear planted firmly on his bony chest. But we had to be careful. Gotham was a green-eyed monster with buildings for legs, my brother warned. And it was then I knew whatever crazy, rags-to-riches plot he’d hatch, my brother wasn’t going to sugarcoat our dreams. He told me I’d only make it through hard work and by our sticking together. We were quick studies. Nina had us tested and confirmed what our mother had found; that we were prodigies—good with numbers, even better with comprehension, and soon we were reading Shakespeare and meeting all those troubled characters who could save us from our all-too-troubled past.
At night, Nina would rearrange the furniture of the cottage to make the stage and would become Lady Capulet or Lady Montague or a host of other characters we needed to shout at or cry to. Nina wasn’t the aggressive stage-mom our mother had been, and her look of apprehension gradually faded as she saw what kind of chemistry we created together.
One night after playing Romeo and Juliet I felt James studying me at the kitchen table. I didn’t know it at the time, but he was already picking out the monologue I’d use at my Juilliard audition. He told me I was too young for Catherine from Taming of the Shrew and her monologues were way overused. Then he took a cork off of Nina’s bottle of burgundy and held it over the candle flame. He rubbed out a mustache beneath my nose. It felt as if in a single stroke I’d become that secret object of my brother’s dreams.
It was one of those last lazy days in September that I learned to lock my legs around his skinny waist and he cried “Cease and Desist,” and I cried with joy because I loved that name and thought it would finally allow us to reinvent ourselves. It linked us like a gorgeous never-ending chain. Cease was nothing without Desist. Desist was just a lost, lonely boy without Cease. I didn’t know at the time what that term really meant, and when I found out I laughed in that bittersweet way we’d gotten used to. It didn’t matter. We were partners in crime. The most beautiful boy in the world had molded me like clay, breathed the fire of life into me, and I’d been reborn. We were bound from the start as only star-crossed lovers could be—and no one was going to tear us apart.
My brother never told me how combustible this game we played would become. I tried to play him. Tried to please him. Tried to love him. Tried to be him. And in the process transformed from an innocent waif into a young Hepburn whose beauty was made nonpareil when she put on those pants and the boy in her stood up to the world.
My brother was not a dark, tragic person, but he was pretty serious about my preparation for the stage, and when he studied me that night I caught a glimpse of his joy at seeing me transform. It was fleeting—as if I’d pulled back a veil on an all-too-serious artist who’d finally let down his guard and allowed himself to fall in love with his creation. I didn’t want it to end and raced over to his clothes cabinet and pulled out a pair of his jeans and one of his button-down shirts. I stood before him. Without a word he handed me a monologue and then he did something I’ll never forget: he placed his thumbs against my temples and gently rubbed, once…twice—in slow revolutions.
I touched my upper lip with my forefinger and then I felt it; a jolt through my chest that shot down to my feet and returned in a steady current that felt as if he’d just cast a wizard’s spell. But it had been real. I don’t remember much of what happened after that. I remember my lips moving and the words steadily rising from my chest, phrases that felt like a golden waterfall of eloquence Shakespeare had found but I was giving life to; I can only remember that the words felt like notes, and each issued forth from my untrained tongue in perfect pitch; I can remember their rhythm, too, a gorgeous melody I could only claim being a host to, because I’d never delivered a speech that felt like a glorious, unrehearsed song. I remember footsteps—Nina had been “backstage” in the kitchen, and she’d rushed in as I finished, only it hadn’t really felt that I’d finished at all—that is, it didn’t feel the way I was used to feeling after giving a monologue—in that stagy way where I merely delivered lines… I looked out beyond the footlights (a lamp we’d found in the closet) and saw beneath a bare bulb my Nina’s glowing, tight-lipped smile. I knew in that moment that she loved me, but I also knew she would become as tough a taskmaster as my brother already was. She gave a single, formal nod, then said, “Cease de Menich, you are meant for the stage.”
James told me the speech was Viola in Twelfth Night, a play about a girl who transformed herself into a boy to hide her affection for a royal she was not supposed to love. There was a single tear on his cheek that he wiped away as inconspicuously as possible. In the silence we both knew we’d stumbled upon a secret that went deeper than some theater game. We turned to Nina, whose look of pride had been replaced by that now familiar look of apprehension.
Little did I know, the game we’d stumbled upon had been played by others; not just by wannabe actors, not even by the stars we studied each night in the movies, not even those big names on the marquees Nina ferried us to every weekend of that fateful summer—but real people with real names who appeared in the all-too-real genealogy in the House of de Menich.
But it’s my Nina’s expression that I most remember about that strange evening. It was really two expressions—a look of pride, and that look of apprehension or fear, together, in a Janus-like tug-of-war. My brother had opened a door for me that night…a simple ritual that turned me from an unbeautiful girl into a young actress no one could take their eyes off…I had “it”—that elusive elixir all wannabes fished for.
I got noticed. I got parts—and I was lucky, too. But there’s a downside to the “X-factor” we’d inherited, a dirty secret no one wants to talk about. I remember now what the first social worker had said after she told us we were normal children who had overcome some incredibly abnormal behavior. How she’d crouched beside me after I finally got out of that hospital bed—gave me that grave look I didn’t understand. She tried to explain that just as people inherited good genes they could also inherit bad genes. All I knew as I studied my brother’s solemn face over her shoulder was that his wounds went a lot deeper than mine. Abuse of this kind binds you, she’d said, and that’s not always a good thing. But I ignored her. Cecile de Menich was dead. She died back in that hospital bed. Cease had taken her place, and together Cease and Desist were bound hand-in-hand, primed to make history.
I loved my brother more than anyone else in the world, but when he finally tore himself away, whole chunks of me went with him. A part of me wishes we’d never left that cottage, a part of me that would’ve been content just adoring my brother’s beautiful face on those wet rocks. But the lights of Gotham beckoned, with marquees looming overhead just waiting to hold the names of the latest tragedians, a couple of prodigious teenagers who had discovered the secret potion to that elixir called fame.
Tracy and Hepburn. Will and Grace. Cease and Desist.
For those of you who’ll vote on who will be the last girl standing, I have to tell you that I think Francis intends to share the sick secrets of my past for all the world to see. But before you press your fingers down on those consoles and decide my fate I want you to know one thing: what I did, I did for love.
“Well, just because you’re masculine doesn’t mean you’re a dyke,” Molly the makeup lady says as she daubs my cheekbones with ruddy hues. I want to ask her what she does to Catherine the Great—aka the Ice Princess—to make her skin look so perfect. I know what she does to make me look so plain. I watch my luminescent cheekbones get reduced to d
irty mounds, and then she opens my mouth so she can insert beside my molars the rubber prosthetics that fatten my face.
“Is that what they’re saying about me?” I ask.
“I’m not allowed to comment on the trades or the other finalists,” she says in an officious tone. But then she gives me a hug that tells me she’s rooting for me—she’ll be getting a lot of credit if I make it to the final round. The first day of shooting Molly cut my shoulder-length hair into a crude pageboy and dulled the color of my wide-set brown eyes with contact lenses. And that was just the beginning. I didn’t really feel “masculine.” In fact, with each new layer of makeup that robbed me of my comeliness, I felt I’d arrived at a place I’d never been before. A place where I could let go of all those phony things an actress does to make you think there’s only one way to play a girl. What did Frenchmen say about Jeanne in her day? Maybe some of the same things Rex is now saying about me. I look down at Molly’s Doc Martens, her black jeans, and say, “Do you know why they killed her? Do you know why Jeanne was burned at the stake?”
Molly shakes her head.
“Because she refused to take off her manly attire. Not for leading an army. Not for trying to unite France. But for dressing and acting like a boy, they pronounced her a heretic. It’s in all the transcripts of the—urf. Mm naaaht kaddding…” I point to my mouth. One of my faux molars has come loose and I sound like Daffy Duck.
Molly steps back to check my hair. “Maybe becoming a boy was the only way she could get the Church and all the people to see the kind of love she stood for. I mean, maybe cross-dressing is the only way people can see there’s a love that stands outside sex.”
Maybe Molly’s on to something, but I don’t have time to think about it. I’ve got a scene today with Susan B. Anthony. I’ve got a score to settle with Eve, the not-so-nice girl who’s playing her. I look down at the script in my lap as Molly looks down at her tablet.
cease and desist Page 5