“Just kiss,” he said.
I couldn’t do it.
“What, you don’t like blondes? You’ve got a thing?”
I waved my finger around helplessly. I suddenly felt I couldn’t breathe.
“I’ll count to ten,” said the director. “One, two, three . . .” I looked into the lens of the camera and saw my upside-down reflection. It was like I was trapped in there in the darkness, suspended from the ceiling, unable to move. I looked at the girls again. Their lips were frosted in pale pink, mealy and shimmering, nothing I’d ever want to kiss. Then one of the girls bent down to my finger and sucked my chewed-up wad of gum into her mouth. I took a step back. I was shocked. I tripped on a cord. The girls tittered. “Ten!” the director shouted.
I did not get the part.
On the way home, I boarded two wrong buses, going east all the way down through Glendale and Chinatown. I walked through downtown Los Angeles, past all the bums and garbage, then finally found a bus on Beverly back to Hancock Park. At home, I walked straight into Mrs. Honigbaum’s office. I could have been irate that she’d sent me there. I could have blamed her for my humiliation. But that didn’t occur to me. I just wanted to be soothed.
“It was bogus,” I told her. “The director was some hippie. There wasn’t even a trash can to throw my gum out in.”
“You win some, you lose some” is all Mrs. Honigbaum said.
“I’m a good kisser, too,” I told her. “Do you think Bob Sears will be mad?”
“Bob Sears doesn’t know his face from his armpit. Let me see your mouth.” She got up from her desk and pointed to a chair. “Sit. I promise I just want to take a look. Now open up.” I did as I was told. I closed my eyes as she peered inside. I could smell her breath, acrid from cigarettes and those harsh mints I’d grown fond of. She hooked a finger into my gums and pulled my bottom lip down, her long nail tapping against my two front teeth. “All right,” she said finally. I opened my eyes. “You have nothing to worry about.” She removed her finger, turned, and went and sat back down at her desk. I took a mint. “I’ll tell you a secret,” she said, sharpening her pencil. “Teeth are what make a star. Teeth and gums. That’s the first thing they look at. That director is a fool. Forget about him. You?” She shook her head. “You’re too good for that guy. Good gums. Good mouth. The lips, everything. My teeth are fake, but I know a thing or two, and you’ve got the proportions.” She turned back to her pad of paper, flicked a page of a magazine, lit a cigarette. I stood. It was a relief to hear I wasn’t doomed for failure, but I was still all torn up inside. If I failed to make it as an actor, where would I go? What else could I do with my life? Mrs. Honigbaum looked up at me as though she’d forgotten I was still sitting there. “Are you going to cry, darling?” she asked. “Are you still upset about the kissing?”
“No,” I answered. I wanted her to embrace me, hold me tight. I wanted her to rock me in her arms as I wept. “I’m not upset.”
“Is that what you wore to the audition?”
I was in my usual getup: leather loafers, tight jeans, and a loose Indian shirt that I thought made me look very open-minded.
“Stuff the crotch next time,” she said. “You’ll feel silly but you won’t regret it. Half of a man’s power to seduce is in the bulge of his loins.”
“Where’s the other half?” I asked. I was completely sincere. By then I’d kissed half a dozen girls in closets at parties back in Gunnison but had never gone all the way. I never had enough enthusiasm to do all the coaxing and convincing it seemed necessary to do. And I was too anxious, too attached to my dreams of stardom to get tangled up in anybody’s private parts. Of course, I thought about sex often. I kept a condom in my wallet, like an ID card. My stepfather had given it to me on my last night in Gunnison. “Don’t go and pierce your ears or anything,” he’d said, and punched me in the arm.
“Power is in the mind,” Mrs. Honigbaum was saying, patting her head, jangling her bracelets. “Read an hour a day and you’ll be smarter than me before you turn twenty. I used to be too smart, and it made me miserable. So now I spend my time on soft stuff, like gossip.” She held up a copy of the coupon circular. “It’s all fluff, but I’m good at what I do. So-and-so is retiring, this one has cancer, that one is going crazy. The Love Boat, can you believe it?”
“Believe what?”
“It’s nothing. Go have a cry, then come back and I’ll tell you a story.”
“But I’m not going to cry,” I insisted. I flashed her a big smile to prove it.
“You go. Have a cry. If you want to talk after, come back. Have another mint.”
I retreated to my room to smoke a joint out the window and listen to the Eagles for a few hours. And I did cry, but I never told Mrs. Honigbaum. In the evening, I went to work and tried to get those blond girls out of my head. Women left lipstick smears on their pizza crusts and the rims of their wine glasses, cigarette butts rattling in their cans of diet soda, phone numbers scribbled on cocktail napkins, smiley faces, Xs and Os. Their winks and tips did nothing for my low spirits, however. At home, I stared at my head shot and tried to pray for solace: God, make me feel good. I cried some more.
• • •
In the morning I called Bob Sears. He mentioned nothing of my failure from the previous day. “I received a call from your mother earlier this morning,” he said instead. He told me that she’d threatened to call the Los Angeles police. If I didn’t call her that day, she’d open a missing-persons case. “She seemed very upset and inquired as to my qualifications as a talent agent. I told her, ‘Madam, I’ve been doing this work for forty-seven years and none of my boys has ever gone missing. Not under my watch.’ I’m not going to send you out into the lion’s den, now, am I? How could I profit? How?”
He gave me the addresses for two casting calls that day, neither of which I went to. I still didn’t feel good. My head hurt. My face was swollen from crying. I spent the rest of the morning in front of the Toshiba, watching Hollywood Squares, Family Feud, all the while imagining my mother’s rage. “It was Larry’s birthday last week. What, now you’re too good to call? You think you’re better than us, than me, your own mother?” I knew she’d be furious. I had nothing to say for myself. I had promised to call, and I hadn’t called. Maybe I wanted to make her worry. Maybe I wanted her to suffer. “I’ve been scared to death,” I imagined she’d say. “How dare you do this to me. What have you been doing? Ballroom dancing? Champagne and caviar? Fooling around with who—whores?” I walked back and forth to the doughnut shop, feeling like a criminal. I didn’t go out to the beach. I just crawled back home into bed, under the covers and listened through the blanket to Days of Our Lives, Another World, Guiding Light. Again I cried. At six o’clock, Mrs. Honigbaum knocked on my door.
“I just got off the phone with Bob Sears,” she said. “It’s time to call your mother. See if she still hates you. Use the phone in the bedroom. Follow me.”
Mrs. Honigbaum led me down the softly carpeted hallway and ushered me into her chambers, which I’d never seen at night before. The poodle scurried under the bed. Mrs. Honigbaum turned on the chandelier, and suddenly everything was cast in dappled yellow light. The perfume bottles and crystal decorations glinted and winked. She slid open the heavy glass door to the backyard to let in some air. “It gets stuffy,” she said. The room was filled with a fragrant breeze. It was nice in there. She pointed to the bed. “Have a seat,” she said. Just then the phone rang.
“Who’s calling me now?” she murmured. She plucked off one earring, handed it to me, and lifted the receiver. “Hello?” I held the large golden earring in my open palm. In its center was an opalescent pearl the size of a quarter. “All right. Thank you,” she said quickly and hung up. “It’s my birthday,” she explained. She took the earring and clipped it back on. “Now, sit here and call your mother. I’ll be your witness. It’ll be fine. Go ahead.”
; She stood there watching me. I had no choice but to pick up the phone.
“Very good,” said Mrs. Honigbaum after I’d slid the tip of my finger into the number on the rotary. “Go ahead,” she said again.
I dialed.
The phone rang and rang. Nobody was answering. It was a Saturday night.
“See, no one’s home,” I said to Mrs. Honigbaum, holding the receiver out toward her.
“Leave a message,” she said. She lit a cigarette. I nodded and listened to the brassy bells dinging on the line, ready to hang up if my mother answered. Mrs. Honigbaum exhaled two huge plumes of smoke through her flared nostrils. “A good message.”
Finally the machine picked up. I heard my mother’s voice for the first time in months. I held the phone out to Mrs. Honigbaum again. “That’s her, that’s what she sounds like,” I said. “She always sounds so mad.”
“Never mind,” said Mrs. Honigbaum.
After I heard the beep, I started my message: “Hi, Mom, it’s me.” I paused. I looked up at Mrs. Honigbaum.
“I’m so sorry I haven’t called,” she whispered. She waved her hand at me, smoke dotting the air, as though to spur me ahead.
“I’m so sorry I haven’t called,” I repeated into the phone.
“My life out here is fabulous. I am making some major progress in my acting career.” Mrs. Honigbaum widened her eyes, waiting for me to proceed.
I repeated what she said.
“And I’m meeting lots of fascinating characters.”
“I’m meeting fascinating characters.”
“I’m safe and eating well. There’s nothing you need to worry about.”
I delivered these lines word for word.
“Please don’t call Bob Sears again. It’s not good for me, professionally.”
“Please don’t call Bob Sears again. It’s not good for me, professionally.”
“I love you, Mother,” said Mrs. Honigbaum.
“I love you,” I said back to her.
“Now hang up.”
I did as I was told.
“There, that wasn’t so hard, now, was it?” Mrs. Honigbaum extinguished her cigarette and sat down beside me on the edge of the bed.
“She’s not going to like it,” I said.
“You’ve done your duty. She’ll sleep better now.” My heart was racing. I bent over and put my head in my hands. “Take some deep breaths,” Mrs. Honigbaum said, a hand rubbing my back. I sat and breathed with her and I felt better. “Now listen. I have something I’ve been meaning to show you,” she said. “I don’t show this to many people. But I think you deserve it. It’s something to make you smarter.”
Then she reached across my lap and opened the drawer of her bedside table. She pulled out a sheaf of index cards. “It’s a special deck of cards I made myself,” she said. She shuffled through them. They were blank on one side, and on the other side they bore strange symbols—mostly shapes, solid or outlined or striped or polka-dotted, in different colors. Mrs. Honigbaum had drawn them all in Magic Marker. One card had three green diamonds. Another had two empty red circles. A solid black square, a striped purple triangle, and so on. The point of the game was to set the cards down in rows and find patterns between the shapes and colors, what have you. “This game is a metaphor for life,” Mrs. Honigbaum explained. “Most people are dumb and can’t see the pattern unless it’s obvious. But there is always a pattern, even when things don’t make sense. If you build your brains up, the people here will think you’re a genius. Nobody else is going to teach you how to do this. You’ll see what I mean.”
She laid out three rows of three cards each on the bedspread.
“The pattern here is easy. Three of the cards have wiggly lines on them.”
I nodded.
She collected the cards, then laid out three more rows. “This set is a little more mysterious. You see these three?” She pointed to three of the cards. One was an empty blue square. One was a solid red rectangle. The other was a striped green star. “Sometimes the pattern is that they’re all different. Do you see that? These three have nothing in common, and that’s exactly what they have in common. Understand?”
I said I did.
“This is how to succeed as an actor. Point out the hidden pattern. Find meaning in the mess. People will kiss your feet.” I watched her pick up the cards again. I didn’t understand what she meant at the time, but I could tell that what she was saying was true. “Practice, practice, practice. You’ve got the brawn, now work on the brain. You want the big time, don’t you? The big roles?”
“Yes,” I answered, though by then I really didn’t. When she looked up at me, I stared deep into her small, blurry eyes. “Thank you,” I said.
“No need to thank me,” she replied. She shuffled and laid down more cards, pointed to three circles. “Easy,” she said and clucked her tongue.
Then she was quiet. She shuffled the cards. She looked at me and shook her head. I thought maybe she was lost in her own reveries and would tell me a story about her dead husband or something funny that happened when she was young. But instead, she put down the cards, placed one hand on my knee, the other over her tanned, bony sternum. “Your mother is a lucky woman to have such a boy,” she said, exhaling as though it hurt her to admit such a painful truth. She lifted her hand from my knee and caressed my face, lovingly, reverently, and shook her head again.
Nothing ever happened under the covers of Mrs. Honigbaum’s bed, but from then on, each night before I fell asleep, she recited some prayers in Hebrew and put her hands on my face and shoulders. Whatever spells she cast, they didn’t work. Neither of us was very surprised.
DANCING IN THE MOONLIGHT
I met her two days before Christmas at a holiday pop-up market on the Lower East Side. This was 2006, and she was selling refurbished antique furniture, which she’d placed around her taped-off space like someone’s fancy living room. She wore tight red trousers and a black shirt that looked like the top of a ballerina’s leotard. Her hair was frizzy, bleached blond, and she had a lot of makeup on—too much, I’d say. Her face was pinched, as though she’d just smelled someone farting. It was that look of revulsion that awoke something in me. She made me want to be a better man.
While she was busy with customers, I sat on a chaise longue for sale and pretended to be fascinated. I pushed at the springs with the palms of my hands. I lay down like a patient in analysis, then sat up again. The thing was priced at $2,750. I took out my cell phone and pressed some buttons, pretending that I wasn’t staring at the girl. Finally she noticed me and came over.
“King Edward, home on the range” is the first thing I ever heard her say. I had no idea what she meant by this. “It’s all mahogany. Late Edwardian. Only that panel has the inlay missing.” She pointed. I turned around to look at the wood. “The festoon there?” she was saying. “But I like it without the mother-of-pearl. Mother-of-pearl would look chintzy, I think, with this shade of leather.” I could only clear my throat and nod. She told me she had reupholstered the chaise in leather from an old armchair she’d stripped on the side of the road. “It was like skinning a deer,” she said. “This past summer in Abilene.”
I turned back around to face her crotch—a tender triangle swollen and divided by the thick protuberance of her zipper fly, thick thighs pulling at the weave of the red wool. A tiny key hung from a coiled loop of white telephone cord wrapped around her left wrist. She fingered the coils with long, chipped black nails. I had to marry her. If I couldn’t, I would kill myself. I broke out in a sweat as though I were about to vomit.
“Field dressing,” I blurted. And then, “Field dressing?” I looked up at her face for some kind of validation. Her eyes were a dark, watery blue.
“Oh, are you a hunter or something?” Again, her face like someone had farted—fragile and strangely condemning, like a queen’s.
“No,” I answered. I went back to pushing on the springs. “But there’s a new book about hunting by this guy in Montana, I think, who says you should smoke weed when you hunt because it attracts the animals. Apparently they’re attracted to it, to your energy and, like, the vibrations in your brain. I don’t totally remember. Not that I smoke weed. I mean, I did in college. I’m thirty-three,” I added, as if this explained something.
“You’re reading a book about hunting?”
She folded her arms. Her mouth, as she waited for my answer, was a heavy, wilted rose.
“No,” I told her. “I was just reading about the book. Online.”
“Oh, okay.” She scratched her head and started to walk away. “The springs are all new,” she said, not bothering to turn around.
I got up and followed her. I asked if she did custom work. “I have this ottoman,” I lied.
“Any custom work would have to wait until after the New Year,” she told me. But I could e-mail her photos in the meantime and let her know what I had in mind.
“I’m definitely going to think seriously about the couch,” I said. I was scared I’d mispronounce the words “chaise longue.” She gave me her business card and smiled falsely. “Gee, thanks,” I said. She said nothing. And so I left, stumbling over the legs of a wicker rocking chair and waving back at her like an idiot. I went straight home and lay in bed, moaning in ecstasy, over and over, each time I read the letters of her name: Britt Wendt.
• • •
“That’s not a name, it’s the beginning of a sentence,” Mark Lasky said over coffee the next day when I told him I was in love. It was Christmas Eve. “And you met her where? Working at a furniture store? Nick, you went to Yale, for Christ’s sake.”
Mark was my oldest friend, the first of many to suddenly quit smoking, lose his hair, get married, and buy a brownstone in a part of Brooklyn he wouldn’t have set foot in five years earlier. Some of these friends had even conceived children already, which seemed preposterous to me at the time. I was nearly thirty-four, approaching the end of my “Jesus year,” as it’s often called. In Christ’s honor, I’d grown my hair out past my ears. I had to use a rubber band and bobby pins to keep loose strands out of my eyes when I went running.
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