Heart of Glass

by Wendy Lawless

  When I reached the south side of the square, I dashed up the stone steps to Vanderbilt Hall, where the movie theater was. I pushed the heavy swinging door open and felt an immediate calm. The familiar hush of the auditorium seemed to stop time. I settled into a shabby red-velvet seat in the back and waited for the lights to go down. It made me think of sitting in the audience with my sister when we were little, at Lincoln Center or the West End of London, or the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, squeezing hands until the moment darkness slowly fell and the show—The Nutcracker or Mame or a Shakespeare play our father was acting in—began.

  “Keep your eyes peeled on the lights,” we’d tell each other as we waited for Daddy to come onstage as Andrew Aguecheek in Twelfth Night or as Trinculo in The Tempest.

  My parents had split up when I was seven. My father was an actor at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, and my mother left him for one of the founders, a wealthy producer named Oliver Rea. We lived in the Dakota and on Park Avenue for the brief period of their marriage and its aftermath. Then, fleeing ghosts of boyfriends, husbands, and lovers past and present, my mother essentially kidnapped my sister and me and took us to London. I didn’t see my father or hear from or of him for ten years. We’d had a brief reunion just before my final fight with my mother, where I’d learned of her deception. While I had a strong emotional connection with my father, I had only spent three days with him out of the last three thousand six hundred or so. His house and second family didn’t at this point qualify as “home.”

  So for me, a theater, any theater, had become over the years a stand-in for home—a kind of sanctuary where I could invoke happier times. I had wound up in this one at NYU by accident, in a way, after my original career choice—acting—hadn’t worked out.

  I had wanted to go to theater school, but none of the schools I auditioned for would have me. Crushed, and lacking any kind of guidance, I spent a miserable year and a half at Boston University, studying whatever, just trying to get to my classes while what was left of my home life imploded: My little sister, Robin, became a runaway, my mother was arrested after drunkenly crashing Robin’s high school graduation (literally, with her car), and I wrestled Mother into AA. When my sister escaped to college far away in the Midwest, I dropped out of BU and moved back home to babysit my crazy mom. I took a job working at a newsstand in Harvard Square, but missing the theater desperately, I lucked into a position at the American Rep, where I met Michael. He encouraged me to start taking photographs—even bought me a used Olympic SLR. Those pictures had gotten me into film school. The logic of it was loopy and half-assed, but, amazingly, it ended up being my ticket out of town and my mother’s life.

  I figured that if acting wasn’t going to work out, perhaps I could find a way to be a filmmaker. Movies appealed to me the way the theater did—they were an escape, a journey to a different place where you could try on someone else’s life for a few hours. But they also spoke to me in a language all their own—a collage of images, cuts, and focuses that I had always understood. My childhood had been a long series of changing locations, casts of characters, and dramatically shifting emotional levels. Movies gave me a way to see my world that made sense. When you grow up privy to conversations about infidelity, drugs, drinking, love, greed, and hatred in language you’re too young to understand, it’s the pictures that tell you the story. The packed suitcase in the foyer tells you all you need to know about the end of Mother’s most recent fight with your stepfather.

  The lights went down, and the musty-looking black curtains slowly creaked back, revealing the screen. In the dark, I heard the other students coughing, making hissing shush noises, and opening binder notebooks. The clacking whir of the projector started up in the booth. I popped the lid off my coffee and opened the wax paper wrapped around my still-warm bagel. The film was Antonioni’s 1966 Blow-Up, the story of a bad-boy fashion photographer in London who discovers he has inadvertently taken pictures of a murder while strolling through a park. I liked the film’s self-­conscious beauty and expected it to be murder mystery, but then it evolved into a treatise on perception and reality. The hero, played by David Hemmings, has no concern or understanding for the world that surrounds him. Because he lives in a world of surfaces, where sex, love, and death are meaningless, he has difficulty discerning what’s real and what isn’t. It also has an amazing sound track by Herbie Hancock.

  After school I walked home, thinking about how lost all the characters in the film were. They were numb with boredom and unhappiness, but at least they got to do it in Swinging Sixties London. It had been fun to see the city where I’d lived for five years, having teenage fun with my sister and our pack of friends while Mother partied and serial-dated, spending her divorce settlement. For years after we moved back to the States, I would draw diagrams of our flats so I would remember the places and times I missed so much. It had been a way to map my recent past, to remember where I had been.

  I turned the key in the lock and opened my apartment door to find Washington in full shooting stance, his gun pointed right at me.

  “Shit!” I raised my book bag like a shield. Bernstein jumped out from behind the door. I was surrounded.

  “You should have knocked,” Washington replied matter-of-factly.

  “But I live here!” I sputtered.

  Bernstein shook his head and headed for the sofa, uncocking his weapon. He seemed pissed off that he hadn’t been able to use me for target practice. I looked around for Beth, but she was barricaded in her room.

  “We have some forms we need you to sign; you’ll most likely be subpoenaed after the suspect is apprehended and taken to trial.” Washington motioned with his gun to a pile of papers on the dining table while I wondered how close they’d come to blowing my head off. He holstered his weapon, took a pen out of his breast pocket, and clicked it, handing it to me with a flourish. “Here.” He pointed a thin, elegant finger to where he wanted me to sign my name. “And here.” His nails were perfect.

  I went to my room and put my bag down on a red-painted wooden chair that I had picked up on the street one day. White flight, rotating students, musicians, and artists had made the downtown sidewalks into a kind of pop-up Salvation Army or Goodwill. I had put a filmy piece of pale green, patterned fabric over my one window. My futon was covered by an Indian-print tablecloth that I had bought at Pier 1. I had decorated the bare white walls with a few postcards, photos, and some pictures I’d cut out of magazines. It was pretty sparse, but I hadn’t been able to get much from my mother’s house before I left. My last conversation with her had not gone well after I’d informed her that I was no longer planning to turn over my $50,000 college fund to her when I turned twenty-one. That money had been left to me by my grandfather, her father, who had obviously known there wouldn’t be anything left to pay for college if she had access to it. So my records, clothes, winter coat, and all my other belongings were at her house, if she hadn’t yet set fire to them in a fit of rage.

  After doing some French homework and studying for a History of Film test, I jotted down some notes about Blow-Up to prepare for the paper I’d be writing. Michael was busy that evening, seeing a play he had an audition for to replace one of the actors. I didn’t feel like spending the evening with Washington and Bernstein, so I decided to go to the movies. The Man Who Fell to Earth was playing at Cinema Village on East Twelfth Street, and as a big David Bowie fan, I didn’t want to miss it. I’d always loved all the glitter-rock guys: Marc Bolan from T. Rex, Bryan Ferry from Roxy Music, and of course Bowie. Robin and I had even gone to his house in London, one day after school, and rung the doorbell, but ran away when the prospect of meeting our idol was too much for us to handle.

  The movie theater was already dark when I slid into a seat with my dinner of fifty-cent popcorn. Only a few other people were in the audience. Bowie plays an alien who has traveled to Earth to find water for his planet, where everyone is dying. He loses his way and bec
omes addicted to television and alcohol. Everyone on his planet, including his wife and children, perish while he rides around drunk in a limo. The movie was trippy, with eerily haunting images, and Bowie looked both ethereal and fantastic in tailored suits, with a soft brown fedora angled over his flame-orange hair. When the lights came up, I enjoyed the afterglow, those moments after a movie is over but you’re still in its world.

  “Are you by any chance wearing Givenchy Gentleman?” a man’s voice asked from behind me. Still a bit dazed, I turned to see a skinny young guy with hazel eyes and a dark blond punky haircut. He was wearing a mustard-colored jacket flecked with purple and a black skinny tie with a red gingham shirt. He looked like a super cute Tintin.

  “Yes, I am.” I had bought a small bottle of Givenchy Gentleman at the drugstore, after falling in love with its woodsy rose and leather scent. I smiled at him.

  “Me, too.” He smiled back. “Did you like the movie?”

  “Oh, I love David Bowie, so, yeah.”

  “Do you wanna go get a cup of coffee?”

  “Sure.”

  We walked down the street to the nearest diner and sat at the counter, drank coffee, and traded life stories. Ben was twenty-two and had just graduated from college. He had moved to New York from middle-of-nowhere Texas and was working in an office downtown as a proofreader, until he figured out what he wanted to do with the rest of his life. He lived in a tiny first-floor apartment with bars over its windows in Alphabet City, six blocks away.

  I had this rushing, excited feeling as we talked, finishing each other’s sentences and proclaiming a shared love for Blondie, Dashiell Hammett, French and Italian movies, and vintage clothing. I felt immediate kinship, an instant closeness that almost seemed as if we had met somewhere before, even though we hadn’t.

  My relationship with Michael was different, more straightforward and sexual. I looked up to him because he was older and wiser, and he’d opened up a world to me, buying me a camera and encouraging me to start my own life away from my mother. But because I had grown up without a father, and my mother was not just promiscuous but rapacious, going through lovers like a Chanel-clad, sex-crazed shark, I was somewhat unsure about the nature of relationships. Like David Hemmings’s character in Blow-Up, my experiences of life were filtered. But instead of a camera lens it was my mother who had distorted my perceptions. What was love? Compatibility? Good sex? The ability to stay up all night talking? Or to be able to be together and not say a word? I wasn’t sure.

  “Have you ever been to the opera?” Ben asked. We were eating french fries and gravy that he had ordered. I confessed to him that I had not.

  “Then you’ll go with me, as my guest.” He beamed at me over the glistening pile of potatoes.

  “Really?” The opera made me think of powdered wigs and lorgnettes.

  He told me that he had box seats for Mozart’s Don Giovanni at the Met in two weeks. He said that the opera was such a pure expression of beauty and truth that I had to experience it. I looked at the clock on the wall. It was 4:00 a.m.

  “Will you come?”

  “Um . . .” My mind suddenly turned to Michael, who probably wouldn’t want me to go to the opera with another man. Still, I felt drawn to Ben in an almost friendish, innocent way. “Can I call you?”

  “No.” He wrote down the date and time of when I was to meet him at Lincoln Center on a napkin and handed it to me. “Here. If you don’t want to come, don’t show up.” He looked me in the eye.

  He explained to me that he didn’t have a phone, so we’d either meet in two weeks at the Met—or not.

  “Okay.” I nodded. It was kind of like a game, and it made me like him even more.

  The sun was just peeking up behind the buildings when Ben walked me home. The garbage trucks had hit the streets, loudly whining and grinding up the trash as the men hurled it into the backs.

  “Good night,” he said at my building. He kissed my hand and walked back toward Alphabet City.

  I took my key out and walked up the three flights to my front door. I was about to put the key in the lock when I stopped. “Washington, Bernstein, don’t draw your guns, it’s me, Wendy,” I called out.

  I let myself in and found them camped out on the couch.

  “Where the hell have you been?” Washington asked. “We were worried about you, girl.”

  “I went to a movie, then out for coffee.”

  “Coffee?! Till dawn?!” Washington looked incredulous. “With that boyfriend of yours?”

  “No, just with someone I met at the movies.”

  “There’s just no one looking out for you, is there?” Bernstein chipped in, shaking his head.

  “You are.” I smiled.

  “Well, we have good news and bad news,” said Washing­ton, getting up, stretching, and adjusting his cuff links.

  The good news was that Harvey had been spotted in Florida at a gas station while he was filling up his rental car. The bad news was that today while the police were questioning the landlord, it came out that he didn’t know Harvey had rented out rooms in the apartment. He told the cops that Beth and I were illegal tenants and we had to be out in twenty-four hours. I asked if Beth knew, and they said she did.

  Now what? Clearly, I wouldn’t be getting my deposit back from a man who was on the lam from the mob. My school tuition was covered by the money my grandfather had left me—just enough for a degree as long as I didn’t switch schools again. My bank account had about $200 in it.

  To cover my deposit for Harvey, I had already sold the monogrammed Louis Vuitton overnight bag my mother had bought me. I had taken it to a swanky leather shop on the Upper East Side, but the owner had sniffed at me and said he wasn’t interested. Luckily, a man from Texas who’d just broken loose from an executive retreat at the Waldorf had overheard our conversation and followed me out of the store.

  “The little lady is going to love this!” Tex chuckled as his piggy fingers peeled off five twenties from a huge wad of cash.

  The bag had my initials on it, and I wanted to ask what his wife’s name was. Wanda? Wilhelmina? I wasn’t sad to see it go. It matched my sister’s and was very much the sort of thing Mother thought we should have. A status-symbol suitcase for those weekends in Paris. Those days were long over—along with the limo rides, the Broadway shows, the fancy hotels, and the posh addresses of my once-privileged girlhood.

  Since it now looked as if I would be needing more money, I went back out to look for a place to sell a few items from my modest jewelry collection. I had considered calling the bank in Kansas City to ask for some cash from my college fund—but decided that my trust officer, the dour and disapproving Mr. Charno, would think that my story about the NYPD coming through my front door searching for a roommate running from the Mafia would sound too much like one of my mother’s zany fabrications designed to suck the account dry.

  WE BUY GOLD! the sign promised as I entered the grimy, little vestibule of the pawnshop, a few blocks from my apartment on lower Broadway. The greasy carpeting and smeared bulletproof glass created the ambience of an impending crime. I placed a gold chain and a gold bracelet with a little French-flag charm in the sliding tray in the wall to be tested and weighed by the sullen, doughy-faced man on the other side of the window. Both pieces had been gifts from my ex-stepdad. The necklace had been presented to me at Sardi’s on my sixteenth birthday, and my ex-stepdad had purchased the bracelet at Cartier during a trip to Paris when I was twelve. My ex-stepdad, or Pop as my sister and I called him, was living comfortably somewhere on the Upper East Side, but after years of paying our private-school tuition and bailing my mother out of various jams long after they’d divorced, he had tired of her gold-digging shenanigans and had finally cut her off completely. He was just another in a long line of bridges Mother had burned. Ultimately, all her relationships turned toxic, and I thought that through guilt by association Pop
wouldn’t be happy to receive a plea for financial help from me.

  The pawnshop man snatched up my jewelry. “You sure you want to sell these?” His dead eyes stared at me from behind the glass. I smiled and nodded, thinking that if I appeared cheerful and not desperate, he’d give me a better price. He just shrugged.

  When I was younger and we needed money, my mother had often resorted to selling something—an emerald ring, the grand piano, or the Rodin sculpture she’d gotten in her divorce settlement from Pop. That way she wouldn’t have to—heaven forbid—go out and get a job. She’d even once talked one of her boyfriends into buying us a new washing machine, though I never saw her do a load of laundry. She wasn’t the domestic type.

  “I’ll give you seventy-five bucks.”

  “Each?” I was hoping that was what he meant.

  “No, for both.”

  Deflated, I nodded and took the money. This and the two hundred in my bank account could get me a new room and maybe a month to find some kind of part-time job. I was sad to part with these fond little trinkets from my girlhood, but it seemed, in a way, Pop was still helping me.

  • • •

  That evening I was meeting Michael at McHale’s, an actor hangout on Eighth Avenue in the theater district. I emerged from the Times Square subway station, breathing the familiar stench of a thousand uncleaned urinals. Trash whirled through the air like dirty confetti. All the taxis seemed to be honking in unison, while the hookers, autograph hounds, three-card monte hustlers, break-dancers, and the rest of the rabble competed for their share of the sidewalks. I walked up Eighth Avenue, past peep shows, the shoe-shine guys, bo­degas, and stores selling sex toys and X-rated videos. A balding man with glasses in a shiny, cheap suit and scuffed Florsheim wing tips careened into me as he slipped out of a dirty-movie theater, clutching his briefcase and a giant pack of diapers, clearly in a hurry to get to Port Authority and the express bus back to New Jersey and his family.