“You’re kidding, right?” Completely shocked, I couldn’t believe he was serious. “I mean, what about you and Liz?”
“I never wanted it to be serious. She feels differently, so it’s a problem. She kind of hates me right now.” He glowered and looked at the linoleum.
“I’m really flattered,” I blustered on, trying to avoid sounding insensitive by telling him I thought he was nuts. “I think your feelings are coming from working on the scene, you’re projecting them onto me. But it’s not . . . me, you know?” Falling for your scene partner, at least temporarily, was common. I was sure that this phenomenon, combined with all the information we were being bombarded with at school, had caused his temporary insanity.
“I don’t know what else to say. If you think that, okay, but I’m in love with you.”
“I’m sorry, Graham. I really like you. I hope we can still be chums.”
He put on his long, herringbone-tweed coat, wrapped a tartan scarf around his neck, and stuffed his script into his pocket. He strode purposefully to the door and turned back to me. He looked miserable. “If this is all upsetting to you, well, think about how I feel.” He threw open the door and left with a slam.
What the fuck? I thought. I just wasn’t the kind of girl who had more than one guy running after her. The last time this had happened to me was at the Town School in Manhattan, when Tommy Rosenberg and Arthur Flatto had both professed undying love for me. I was seven. So it had been a while.
I threw myself into classes: ballet, singing, voice. November arrived, and we were all cast in projects. One group would be doing Lanford Wilson’s Balm in Gilead, which Ethan would direct, and Ned would be directing Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie for the other group. Ned had told me, in secret, that he wanted to cast me as Laura, the fragile sister of the main character, Tom. I was thrilled that he thought I could do it—I wasn’t sure I could myself, and it scared me. I was also unsure he could pull it off and worried that it wasn’t a good idea, considering our relationship. But the casting lists went up—and I was to play the part. My classmate Leslie was to play Amanda Wingfield, Graham was cast as her son, Tom, and JB as the gentleman caller.
We worked hard learning our lines but also did a fair amount of improvisation in rehearsals. We cooked dinner and ate together as the Wingfield family. We went out on an excursion, and I shoplifted a little bottle of pink nail polish at the drugstore, thinking it would be good to have a secret—one that could be discovered in a way similar to Amanda’s discovery that Laura has not been attending her typing lessons. I worked with MJC in Alexander class on Laura’s physicality—she had pleurisy as a child and has a pronounced limp, another reason for her fear of people and the outside world. I scribbled in a notebook, answering all the questions Ethan had told us we must answer when working on a character: Who am I? What’s around me? What time is it? It was a new approach for me, and I relished the process. For the first time in my life, I was working to build a character from the inside out, instead of simply projecting my own past onto her or just playing pretend as I went along.
On the weekends, Ned and I would often go off on an adventure. Not ready to out our relationship at school, we usually drove into the mountains, where there was little chance of running into anyone we knew. We drove to Central City one weekend, an old mining town that was now a quaint tourist attraction with original storefronts from the 1850s lining the streets. We had Bloody Marys at the Teller House bar, where the famous portrait of a beautiful woman looks up at you from the barroom floor. Next door was the opera house, built in 1878, where Buffalo Bill had once performed and P. T. Barnum had presented his circus. Once we drove to Estes Park and ate corned-beef sandwiches at the Stanley Hotel—a supposedly haunted hotel that had inspired Stephen King to write The Shining. We had fun wherever we went, so much so that people stared and pointed at us. I was head over heels in love with him and told him all the time, and he told me he loved me, too. It was as if my blood moved faster when I was with him. He was always buying me thoughtful gifts—a copy of my favorite children’s book, Eloise, a red bomber jacket that I’d admired in a store one day, and a thin, beaded silver friendship bracelet.
But our sex life was kind of a letdown. With all the intense feelings we had for each other, it didn’t seem to translate into amazing sex. We’d spent what seemed like weeks doing what my mother would have called “heavy petting.” I had rug burns on my ass from rolling around naked on the floor in front of the fireplace at his apartment, a sort of consolation prize for waiting for things to get to the next level.
He was a fantastic kisser and generous in bed, but when it came to the actual mechanics—he had trouble. The first time we were together, at my apartment, he couldn’t get hard. I didn’t know how to react, having never encountered this before—unless the guy was fall-down drunk.
“Is it me?”
“No, no, it’s not.”
He got out of bed and sat on the floor next to me.
“It doesn’t matter. I mean, we can do other stuff.” I didn’t want him to think I thought it was a big deal—like lack of penetration was a deal breaker. I smiled while he looked down at the floor. Maybe this was why he’d wanted to take it slow and not jump into bed right away. I couldn’t ask him.
We were entering the holiday season—which I always had mixed emotions about. My stepsisters and my dad would be flying out to spend Christmas in Denver. I started to hear an old sound in my head, the usual dread I experienced as the holidays approached. I knew my sister wasn’t coming—she’d told me it was too painful for her and she planned to stay in Boston with her friends—and I understood, but I felt deserted by her, by her choice to spend Christmas with someone other than me. Ned invited me to go with him to visit his parents in New Jersey. No matter how much I wanted to run away, I knew that I never would. It ended up being fine—my stepmother taught me how to knit. I had fun with my stepsisters: we chatted, played cards, smoked, and drank bourbon. I didn’t die. I tried hard to be a joiner and not feel outside the group. There were other people, friends of Daddy and Sarah’s, and stragglers from the theater who had no place to go, so it felt more like a party than a holiday. But I missed Ned.
• • •
After the holiday break, school started back up, rehearsals continued. We had a new teacher for mask class, Craig Turner. Mask eluded me, it seemed so difficult and vast. When an actor puts one on, it’s a way of vanishing into this other world—to the time of the Greeks—but every gesture is wildly magnified because the face is covered. Sometimes, in classes that intimidated me, such as mask, I threw something together at the last minute. Arriving only partially prepared, I could shrug off not being good and pretend it didn’t matter to me.
My relationship with Ned, on the other hand, seemed effortless. We finally ventured out to the Wazee as a couple—our public debut—for a large gathering of students, actors from the company, and a few of our teachers, including Ethan. People ogled and nudged elbows—a bit too much, I thought, as if we were suddenly back in high school. Ethan, noticing all the unwanted attention we were getting, shrugged his shoulders as if to say, So what? I appreciated the gesture. But I still felt self-conscious because Ned was my teacher and I didn’t want anyone to think I was receiving preferential treatment. When someone introduced me as Jimmy Lawless’s daughter, I balked a little, too, because I wanted to be judged on my talents, not thought of as someone who had an advantage because of her father or her boyfriend.
One morning after I had slept over at Ned’s place, he was in the shower. His roommate, Ken, was making coffee in the kitchen—I helped myself and thanked him. Walking around Ned’s small bedroom looking for my shoes, I saw his wallet. Without thinking, I picked it up, opened it, and looked at his driver’s-license picture. He looked super cute. I set down my coffee mug and looked inside the fold, thinking I’d slide out a couple bucks to make a joke when he got back about hoping
he’d had a good time. A few twenties were in the billfold slot, but I saw something else. I pulled out a small photograph of a young woman, beautiful with dark long hair and a beaming smile, wearing a yellow sweater with a locket hung around her neck. Behind the photo was a clipping from a newspaper in San Francisco. The same photo I held in my hand appeared in the article. I read that she was an ACT student who’d been offered a ride home from her movie usher job by a coworker. He had murdered her and dumped her body by the side of the road. My hands tingled as I read about how they’d searched for her for days before finding her body. I looked at the picture. Who was she? Why did Ned have a picture of her and a clipping about her murder in his wallet? Was she his girlfriend? Why hadn’t he told me about her?
I didn’t hear the shower turn off. I was standing next to his bed looking at this girl’s smiling face when Ned walked in wearing a towel. He saw me, and I looked at him. Because it was so strange, I didn’t feel embarrassed about being such a snoop.
“Who is this?” I felt a little flipped out.
“She was a very good friend of mine.” He started to get dressed, pulling on his usual all-black ensemble.
“Was she your girlfriend?” It seemed so bizarre to me. I thought we were so close, and he suddenly had this huge secret. A secret he carried with him in his pocket every day.
“No. We were close.”
I put the picture and the clipping back in his wallet. “Why didn’t you tell me about her, about this?” I didn’t understand. I was jealous and hurt—how could I compete with a dead girl?
“I’m going to have to go back next week to the inquest.”
“Okay.” I gulped, trying to comprehend how he and I could be together all the time and he’d decided not to say anything until I looked in his wallet. Would he even have told me if I hadn’t found the photo? “It’s just . . . I’m surprised, that’s all.”
He didn’t respond.
A week later, I drove him to the airport—he was heading to San Francisco for the inquest. I told him to call me. I waited to hear from him that evening but never did. I was worried and would have called him if I’d known how to reach him.
The next day at school, during voice class, there was a fire drill. We all spilled out onto the street. I saw Ken, Ned’s roommate, and ran over to him to ask if he’d heard from Ned. He said Ned’d left a garbled message on the answering machine. Then he glanced around shiftily, lowering his voice to a whisper. “Ned really wants to be alone. He doesn’t want anyone to know where he is. And he told me he was afraid he’d hurt your feelings by telling you.”
“Um . . . all right.” My mind was reeling—Ned’s weaselly roomie as the messenger in our relationship? What the hell was going on?
“I’d be happy to keep you posted if I hear anything.”
“I don’t understand.”
“He said he’d talk to you when he gets back.”
Ken smiled and looked at me with saccharine, insincere sympathy. I walked away, trying not to burst into tears.
When we got back inside the building, I saw my classmate Adam, who’d been at ACT the year before with Ned and the dead girl, leaning on the soda machine outside the bathrooms. I walked over to him and asked in a quiet voice if he’d known her that well. It turned out that Adam had been close to her—I remembered seeing his name in the clipping in Ned’s wallet. Looking pained, Adam told me some things that made me feel uneasy. He said that Ned hadn’t been that close to her, that he wanted to be, but she wasn’t interested.
“We were both in love with her. It was so fucking horrible when they found her.”
I nodded.
“She would have been in our class, you know. But she’s not here.”
Then Adam looked at me gravely—as if he wanted to say something, but wasn’t sure he should.
“What is it?” I reached out and touched his arm.
He ran his slender fingers through his hair and looked off down the hallway. “It’s just that . . . well, we were really tight, and . . .”
“Tell me.”
“You remind me of her.”
“But she had dark hair and—”
“No, I mean, you’re like her. The first time I saw you, talked to you, watched your audition pieces—that’s what I thought. It’s really weird. You have the same sort of, I dunno . . . talent and openness that she had.” He shook his head. “Ned always goes after the shiniest thing in the room. This time it’s you.”
I didn’t know what to say to this. Feeling sick to my stomach, I took the elevator downstairs. I walked the streets for a few hours, bewildered, wondering what the fuck was going on. Did he love me? Or did he love the part of me that reminded him of her? Did I love him? Was he even in San Francisco? All of a sudden I felt as if I were in some creepy Brian De Palma movie.
I thought about how strongly Ned had come on to me when we first met, all the compliments, and the wildly inappropriate comment he’d made in the library about my period, which had thrown me at the time, but now seemed like a manipulation—something he’d said to make me feel vulnerable, and in awe of him, as if he could read my mind. In rehearsals for the play, he only said positive things about my work, whereas I worried that I wasn’t learning or growing in the role. All the weird sex problems and the murdered girl in his wallet. Suddenly, he seemed false to me, and I didn’t feel I could trust him. It was as if it were all a mirage.
When Ned got back, I didn’t tell him about my conversation with Adam. He didn’t say anything about the inquest, and I didn’t ask. Instead, I told him that I thought we should take a break. It was too much, going to school, rehearsing the play. I had to start working harder—there were so many distractions, and I wasn’t taking it seriously enough. I told him I was overwhelmed and needed some time to myself.
He listened patiently and nodded. “Okay. If that’s the way you feel.”
I was surprised he’d taken it so well. I expected more of a fight.
But that night, when I got back to my apartment, I saw Ned’s car driving slowly down my block as I made my way inside, and my answering machine was full of hang-up calls.
Meanwhile, Graham and I had been spending a lot of time together, rehearsing and running lines for The Glass Menagerie. In the wake of this weirdness with Ned, I kept thinking back to the time Graham had told me he had a thing for me. He’d stop by my place for a cup of coffee or we’d pop out for drinks. We had a lot of laughs, and though I didn’t know if he still cared for me that way, I found myself wondering more and more if he did.
One night, after a rehearsal in my kitchen, Leslie left and Graham lingered. I told him that I thought about him a lot. He said he still felt the same way he had back when we were scene partners. We discussed it all in a logical, grown-up way—and decided we shouldn’t get involved, just remain friends. He’d had a bad breakup recently, and I had just dumped Ned. It seemed best not to plunge into a relationship when the rose garden was littered with our victims.
Rehearsals complete, we performed The Glass Menagerie and received a fair amount of criticism. Ethan felt that I was too resilient as Laura. I had been too afraid to go too far with the character’s disability. I didn’t want her to be a victim. Allen said that it was a “tragic mistake” to have made in my performance. But he praised other things and he cried through a couple of scenes, so I thought he’d been moved a little.
“This is the place where Wendy should be allowed to branch out and play roles of depth and power! Not wallflower parts,” our voice teacher, Bonnie, said somewhat angrily, zeroing in on what would become one of my biggest challenges at school, and my bête noire: I was in jeopardy of being typecast as ingenues because of my height and sweet appearance. My whole life, people had called me “flower” or “butterfly” or patted me on the head as if I were a kitten.
I often felt that I shared something with Bonnie: we were both little peo
ple who were big inside and pissed off about the way other people saw us and treated us because of our size. When I had performed a monologue from Romeo and Juliet for David Hammond, an expert teacher of interpreting Shakespeare, he told me that it was “cute.” That was all—dismissing me in one little, and little-sounding, word. I was furious and embarrassed, trying to pretend I didn’t care what he’d said even as my face turned red and my ears prickled with anger.
After the feedback on The Glass Menagerie, I was determined to change the faculty’s perception of me by working in scene class on ballsy women—Marlene in Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls, a cutthroat executive who’s given her child to her housewife sister to raise; Irene in Idiot’s Delight, a pathological liar and con artist; even Shakespeare’s Cleopatra, who was larger-than-life and a drama queen. I also started working with Bonnie, when we both had time, on a Richard III speech that was filled with fury and darkness.
“This is some of the best work I’ve seen you do, Wendy.” She beamed at me. “I see all the rage inside the character, and your voice dropped to a lower octave as well! Excellent.”
I kept working away at showing my range as an actress, praying it would make a difference onstage.
During a sunny January after projects were over, our Alexander teacher, MJC, had a big bash at his house, to celebrate surviving projects. It was loud and boozy—everyone was letting off steam. We’d all been under so much pressure. I was standing in the hall outside the bathroom, talking with MJC and nursing a Jack Daniel’s when Graham walked by. MJC reached out to take Graham’s arm and dragged us both into the bathroom with him. I was confused, until MJC spoke.
“You two are such special people. You should really be together.”
Without another word, he walked out, closing the door behind him. Graham and I looked at each other for a long moment. Then we fell into each other’s arms, tumbling onto the cold tile floor.
I worried that, like my mother, I was going through men at tramplike speed—but I was searching for something real. A true love. I’m sure many people looked at me and thought, Slut. But I was filled with hope each time. For me, it wasn’t about sex—it was about finding the love and acceptance I’d never had. Not knowing what to look for in a guy, I gravitated toward the ones who seemed to want me. I figured that was half the battle—getting some man to hanker for me—so if he did already, why not give it a go?
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