“Are ya sure? It’s really gonna change the way you look.”
I looked at her, tattoos covering her arms and the backs of her hands, a small cupcake with a cherry on her neck, and said, “I’m sure.”
When Michael saw my new hairdo, he freaked.
“Jesus Christ! What the hell did you do?” He looked at my short, spiky pixie cut in dismay. “It’s so . . . severe.” He practically shuddered.
He hated it.
“I think I look like Jean Seberg in Breathless. It does make my neck feel cold, though.” I ran my hand back and forth, savoring the feel of my newly shorn scalp.
The hairdo had been a fuck-you gesture, meant to horrify my boyfriend. But looking in the mirror, I saw a tough girl; it made me feel powerful and new. I wasn’t going to change the way I dressed or styled my hair for him. I was going to rebel.
• • •
That weekend, we went to Boston to visit Michael’s stepfather, Robert Brustein, a revered intellectual man of the theater. He was a big celebrity in that world; he’d written plays and myriad books on the theater and run the Yale School of Drama before leaving to start the American Repertory Theater (ART) in Cambridge, Massachusetts. If that weren’t enough to live up to, Michael’s father was a hugely successful Broadway and television producer, and Michael’s half sisters were all young, gorgeous supermodel/actresses. He was surrounded on all sides. I felt for him and saw the ways in which we were alike, with our broken families, even though that similarity didn’t seem to bring us any closer.
I had only met Brustein once before, when Michael and I had first started seeing each other and we’d been invited to tea. Brustein had been married to Michael’s mom, who had died suddenly at the age of fifty-one of a stroke the year before Michael and I met. I had been so immersed in my battles with my own mother, I had probably not been especially aware of the depth of my boyfriend’s grief over the death of his mom. It had hit me that afternoon, during our visit to Brustein’s grand house on Brattle Street, when I saw all the framed pictures on the walls and tables of the beautiful and beloved woman who had died so young. I was hugely intimidated in Brustein’s presence. He was so imposing, intelligent, and effusive, holding forth on topics I knew nothing about—from politics to Jean Cocteau to gravlax—he seemed to know everything or certainly acted as if he did. He terrified me, and I didn’t utter a word that afternoon except to say please and thank you. While I may have been temporarily intimidated by the bluff of my pretentious film-school classmates and the bluster of Michael’s young-turk actor friends, this was the real deal; I was convinced that if I opened my mouth to speak, he’d immediately see me as an insecure, inarticulate, silly girl.
We drove up Friday afternoon, and a big dinner party was in progress when we arrived. Michael and I were seated separately—most of the guests were actors and directors from the ART. Some of them I recognized from my time there working as a dresser; one of them had even pinched my ass at a party once. But it had been dark backstage, so no one seemed to recognize me. That was fine. I smiled at jokes when everyone else laughed, passed the food when it reached me, and tried to remember my best table manners from childhood. Coffee, brandy, and cigars were broken out after dinner. The smell of the smoke was horrible, and I wondered absently how I’d get it out of my clothes and hair.
When we went upstairs to our room, Michael looked at me quizzically.
“Why didn’t you say anything?” He unbuttoned his shirt and threw it on a chair in the corner. I shrugged my shoulders. He took off his pants, tossing them aside, and riffled through his shaving kit in his boxer shorts. “You just clammed up. I mean, couldn’t you find anyone to talk to, or something? You looked so . . . I dunno . . . bored.”
“I didn’t have anything to say, I guess.” I chewed my nails, longing to just turn out the lights and go to sleep.
“Jesus, Wendy”—he looked at me and shook his head—“only children bite their nails.”
I yanked my hand away from my mouth, instantly feeling the wave of shame I’d experienced as a little girl when my mother harshly commented on this bad habit of mine. I had started biting my nails around the age of nine and traced it back to being nervous while watching my father onstage, worried that something might happen to him. Maybe it was from the time I saw an épée scratch his cornea at a rehearsal for Hamlet when I was a kid—I would never know for sure. There didn’t seem to be a way to make me stop. My mother had threatened to take away the little emerald ring she’d bought me when I was ten; she’d also threatened a few times to chop my fingers off with a kitchen knife, even chasing me around our Park Avenue apartment once with a pair of shears while I screamed and ran from her. Clearly, none of it worked.
Feeling like even more of a loser than I had during dinner, I quickly changed and slipped into bed, pretending to be asleep when Michael returned from the bathroom to turn off the light. I just felt sad and far away from everything—the theater glitterati at dinner and my boyfriend’s painful attempts at the dinner table to show them he wasn’t just another unemployed actor. I closed my eyes, wishing we could leave in the morning.
The following day, we hung out with Michael’s younger half brother, Tommy, in Harvard Square. A sweet kid in his early teens, he had red hair and freckles and was a little goofy in a cute way. We ate lunch at Mr. Bartley’s, a burger place with an impossibly long menu of hamburgers named after celebrities. We browsed in the shops—the Coop, the Harvard Book Store—and Michael bought Tommy a cool Velvet Underground T-shirt at Urban Outfitters. By the time five o’clock came by, I had formulated a plan, complete with alibi, to escape another evening of hanging with all the geniuses at Brustein’s. I told Michael I was going to catch up with some BU friends at a Boston bar. It was a complete lie, but even after a nice day with Tommy, I was restless and bored and still pissed at Michael for making that remark about my nail-biting.
It was beginning to dawn on me that, sure, I was messed up and adrift at this point in my life. But so was he. The difference was I was twenty. He seemed to look at me as if I were one of his projects—like his apartment. He was trying to fix me up. But it was a way to avoid his own problems, his own lack of success. It was easier to focus on me and my faults rather than turn and look at himself. Honestly, it was exhausting and making me kind of hate him. I even started to dislike the way he smelled; he gave off this peculiar cheap-plastic-toy odor from this dandruff shampoo he had started using. I couldn’t stand it.
A little after five, we walked down to Out of Town News, where I briefly peddled magazines and newspapers before starting at the ART. Michael handed me the car keys, and I gave each of the boys a peck on the cheek. Tommy and Michael had a short and scenic walk back to Brustein’s house on Brattle Street, and I went to get the car, parked on Mass Ave, behind the newsstand.
I fired up the Dodge Dart and started down Brattle Street, passing Michael and Tommy, who were trundling along the cobblestone sidewalk, talking too animatedly to notice me driving by. I was planning a return romp to all the scenes of the crimes of my teen years—a Wendy Lawless nostalgia tour. They weren’t the happiest of memories, but they were mine. I turned right onto Mount Auburn Street, past the hospital where my mother had been rushed in an ambulance on Thanksgiving just three years before, hemorrhaging from an IUD she’d gotten when we lived in London—out-of-date and overworked, it had given out and attacked her insides.
I passed the sprawling Colonial we had lived in on Fresh Pond Parkway before being evicted for not being able to pay our rent, our situation made even more pathetic and ridiculous by Mother, who noisily accused the landlord of raping her, even brandishing her torn Pucci panties as proof to the moving men as they were carrying our belongings out.
There was the Howard Johnson where I once saw Pat Metheny and where my mother liked to befriend sad, drunk ladies, insisting later that I drive them home after she bought them martinis and cheeseburgers. Onto Be
lmont Street, past the public high school whose keg parties my sister and I had sometimes crashed in the summer. Then up the hill to our old house, on Ivy Road.
The house that the three of us had last lived in as a family was a stately brick two-story, with a sunporch and large rhododendron bushes flanking the windows. A narrow brick path led up to the front door, and terra-cotta tiles lay in scalloped rows on the roof. A year later, my mother had moved away—I didn’t know where—and hated my guts. My sister was at Stephens College in Missouri, safe, for now, from our mother’s fury. Even though most of my memories in that house were so hairy, I was still happy to see it. After all, it had been my home, or one of them anyway. The brick house looked ordinary and serene to me now; I no longer felt that impending sense of doom I used to experience pulling up to the curb on my way home from school. The past had somehow been defused, exorcised by the house’s new owners or perhaps just from my few months away.
Switching off the engine, I got out of the car. I walked to the edge of the front lawn, looking into the lit windows of the house. I could see a woman and a man sitting at a dining table, a young girl clearing dishes. Outside in the dusk, the wind blew gently through the lone tree on the front lawn, which was thicker and taller than I remembered.
Then, from under a bush, there came a cat. It was a lilac-point Siamese, with the same pale blue, almond-shaped eyes, crooked tail, and trim, sinewy build as my cat Gus, who had lived in this house with us and had been such a comfort to me and who, I felt, knew me in a way only the two of us could understand. Meowing, the cat walked right up to me and rubbed against my legs, so I knelt down to pet this other Gus. My cat now lived with my mother, and I would most likely never see him again. I looked up to see the young girl come out of the front door. She walked up to me and picked up the cat. Tall and dark, and startlingly pretty in a classic preppy way, she was wearing a Concord Academy sweatshirt and jeans, looking like the quintessential popular, lacrosse-playing high school sophomore.
“Hi, can I help you?” she asked politely. I could hear the cat purr and longed to hold him. His long legs stuck out straight, lining her elbow. He looked at me haughtily, as if to say, Where the hell have you been?
“Oh, well, I used to live here.” I pointed at the windows of the bedroom where my mother used to hide. “About a year or so ago.”
“Do you want to come in? I’m sure my parents wouldn’t mind.”
I had driven past streets and streets of houses filled with people like her and her mom and dad on my way to this house, wondering what it would be like to live in a home where all those routine, normal things occurred.
“Thanks, no.” I didn’t want to go inside. The house was beautiful all lit up and with happy people living in it. I looked at her Gus cat and wondered if he was a sign. I decided he was. Nice to see you, I thought.
“Well, good night.” The strapping teen turned and took Gus the ghost up the pathway to the front door. I nodded and smiled.
Back at the car, I looked out at the view from Belmont Hill over the city of Boston, starting to shine in the evening dark. I felt that same sense of freedom I remembered having in high school sitting on the hood of my boyfriend’s car drinking Rolling Rocks and watching the city lights—I was alone and no one knew where I was. The night was mine.
I got in the car and turned on the ignition; the radio came to life. I turned the dial to my old favorite WBCN, the radio station where I used to hang out with my rock-’n’-roll pal Amy, and where we tried to get on guest lists at clubs to see Steel Pulse and Herman Brood & His Wild Romance.
Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart” was just ending, and Oedipus, the famous punk-rock DJ, came on, introducing the next song, by the Clash, “London Calling,” as I drove though Belmont center, all the shops closed up and dark. Since I had nowhere to go, I decided to head down to the station to say hi to Oedi. I’d always thought that he might have a little thing for me—or maybe he just gave all the girls that hungry look. It’ll be fun to find out, I thought.
I pulled onto Soldiers Field Road along the Charles River and continued onto Storrow Drive—the road my sister and I used to drag race on with anybody who’d chase us after Robbie flipped them the bird. As I passed my old college, BU, I thought of all the nights I’d spent at WBCN with Amy, answering an occasional telephone to take a request and getting to meet some of the musicians from local Boston bands. It was also where I’d met my friend Lee Thompson, who played the sax in Madness and passed in and out of my life periodically.
WBCN had moved a year before from its original location in a penthouse in the Prudential Tower to a subterranean, bunkerlike building five minutes farther away on Boylston Street in the shadow of Fenway Park. I turned into the lot in front of the building and saw a lightbulb screwed into the wall above the door—there was no sign.
I pushed the door open and walked down a sloped, brightly lit corridor that led to a large, dark-carpeted, windowless room with a low ceiling. Some scruffy club kids milled around, talking on the listener-line phones at a table pushed up against the back wall. Behind them I could see Oedi, seated at the board on the other side of the glass partition, headphones on. He looked up and gave me one of his wicked smiles.
“Can I help you?” a skinny, pimply guy in a pilled, stretched-out, olive-green sweater asked.
“Um, no . . . I just came to say hello to Oedipus.”
Oedi motioned with one thin, white arm for me to come on in.
“Oh, go ahead.”
I went through the double, soundproofed doors into the room. I had never actually been inside the booth. Oedi, dressed in a tight, sleeveless, black T-shirt and jeans, was putting what looked like eight-tracks into a machine next to him. He turned and looked at me. Perhaps eight or nine years older than I was, Oedi was not handsome or tall, was a kind of a runt-of-the-litter type. But in a true revenge-of-the-nerds move, he had transformed himself into this sexy, ice-cold dude who dressed like a rock star and oozed power and cool. He was a Boston celebrity—the first punk-rock DJ—and he knew it.
“Hey, it’s Wendy. What are you doing here? I’d heard you were living in New York.”
“Just visiting for the weekend. Yeah, I’m going to NYU—film school.”
“Impressive. I’ll be finished here in about fifteen minutes. Wanna wait?”
“Sure.” I wandered around the room, which was a maze of shelves filled with LPs. There had to have been thousands. I ran my finger along them, reading the titles on the spines—B-52s, Bad Brains, the Beat, Black Uhuru, Blondie, Buzzcocks. I was back in a corner when suddenly I felt hands on me. I turned around, and Oedi pushed me against the wall of records, planting a kiss on my lips. It was slightly savage, deep and abrupt—as I hadn’t known it was coming—his teeth biting into my lip. I knew we were blocked from being seen by anyone outside the booth, but the suddenness and ferocity of the kiss made me feel as if I might be a little out of my element. Of course, I didn’t want him to know that or to see it on my face.
“Almost done,” he murmured into my ear, biting my lobe so hard I nearly let out a yelp. I was nervous, excited, and frightened all at once. I was being a bad girl—for the first time in my life—and there was something thrilling about it.
In the Dart, I followed him back to his apartment, where he offered me a beer. Then, before I even took off my coat, he walked back into what I assumed was his bedroom. I watched him light a candle next to the bed and put on music.
Really? No sweet talk? No foreplay on the sofa first? Just, Here’s a beer and let’s fuck? But I wanted him to think I had done this sort of thing before, so I tossed my coat on a chair and walked nonchalantly into his bedroom.
By the time I got there, he was undressed and under the covers. Some kind of slow, throbbing make-out music was playing. I took off my clothes and slid in beside him. The sex was mechanical, very little touching besides the necessary parts. It was ov
er quickly, and he rolled off me unceremoniously. After the dangerous thrill and promise of the kiss in the record stacks, I felt the letdown of mild shock and disappointment—from the image of how I’d thought it would happen, sleeping with a kind of famous person, instead of the way it had gone down. I had been expecting it to be more passionate, maybe even wilder and with more of a connection. Not that I was such a sexpert. I guessed this was how guys like him did this. He probably had women throwing themselves at him all the time, because of his job and connections. I was just another lay.
“You should probably go,” he said. “I have a big day tomorrow.”
“Sure. Me, too.”
I dressed and picked up my coat on my way out of the apartment. In stereotypical ungentlemanly fashion, he didn’t even walk me to the door. Driving home in the dark, I felt foolish and ashamed of myself. I’d been flattered thinking that Oedi wanted me, but now realized that it had meant nothing to him. I could have been any girl. And I’d betrayed Michael.
I was back at the house on Brattle by one in the morning and crept around to the back door, knowing it would be unlocked. Years of experience sneaking home without Mother’s hearing had taught me how to be cat-burglar quiet. I took off my shoes, padding through the kitchen to the stairs. Slowly, step by step, I tiptoed up to the second floor like a partially paralyzed ballet dancer, slowly turned the doorknob to the room where Michael slept, slipped in, stripped off my clothes, and carefully slid into bed without making a sound. Not only was I a sneak, I thought, I was also a total whore. Okay, maybe not a whore, since I hadn’t gotten paid, but definitely a slut.
The next morning, we had breakfast with Michael’s stepdad and half brother before heading back to New York. Sleep deprived and filled with fear that everyone could see the blazing-red Hester Prynne A on my forehead, I almost barfed from the smell of the cigar smoke mixed with onions and smoked salmon. I wasn’t a sophisticated eater and had hoped for French toast or pancakes.
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