Heart of Glass

by Wendy Lawless

  At the end of the summer, driven crazy with boredom and forlorn at my solitary, too-thin state, I flew to New York to see Jenny and Pete. They were busy with plans to move to Buffalo so Pete could go to medical school, but my old room was waiting for me. I hung out there for a few weeks and helped them pack up their stuff, playing house again. On one of my last days in the city, I was standing in line at the stinky Red Apple grocery store, buying pasta for dinner and tampons for Jenny, when I grabbed a People magazine and started leafing through the lives of the rich and fabulous, many of whom—I felt sure—had never had to stoop to a job in phone sales. On the last page, where they usually had little tidbits of juicy news, or the next go-to celebrity hairdo, was an article about a movie that Frank Sinatra was set to star in, which was being produced by his daughter Tina. It was called Somebody Turn Off the Wind Machine, based on a novel by Georgann Rea. I was thunderstruck. My mother’s book was a thinly fictionalized account of a trip Robin and I had made with her to Kansas City in 1974 to see our cantankerous and frosty grandfather before he succumbed to cancer. So Frank Sinatra was playing my grandfather, and JoBeth Williams was attached to star as Samantha, the gorgeous, bilingual, brilliant mother of two, the character my mother had based on herself. I was perturbed at the casting choice of Sinatra—my grandfather was more like the grouchy guy Henry Fonda played in On Golden Pond—but JoBeth would totally work. After my initial shock at seeing my mother’s name in print, and a kind of strange, almost jealous dip in my stomach, I laughed. She’d spent years writing that damn book on her typewriter while torturing my sister and me, and now she was in a national magazine? It was like a sick joke, but still a joke. She worshipped Old Blue Eyes and craved money and attention. It was so exquisitely my mother; she always landed on her feet. I left the People at the checkout.

  Right before I was to go back to Denver to start my second year at NTC, Graham called me. I was surprised when he asked me to meet him. His voice sounded so different; lighter somehow and happy to talk to me.

  “Wendy, I need a favor.” He was in a pay phone about ten blocks away.

  “How did you get my number?” Why was he calling?

  “From John and Jen. So can you come?”

  I knew I should say no. But I didn’t. I couldn’t help myself, like a little kid picking a scab. “Sure, I guess. What’s up?”

  “Well, I need to go shopping . . . for clothes.” He laughed. “So I was hoping you’d help me pick stuff out.”

  He said he wanted me to meet him on Broadway and Eighty-sixth Street because he was staying at an aunt’s house on the Upper East Side.

  I met him about an hour later. He was standing on the street, wearing what he always wore—khaki pants, a striped button-down shirt, and worn gym shoes. His sleeves were rolled up, showing his tan arms. He was probably the only person who could go to Ireland and get a tan. He had a ragg wool sweater tied around his waist. I noticed that his clothes looked odd; they were ripped and stretched out, and his sweater had huge holes in it, as though he’d caught it on something sharp. His shirt was torn at both elbows.

  I gave him a modest hug, then looked him up and down. “What’s with the scarecrow routine?”

  He told me that while he was in Ireland, he had saved a ten-year-old girl from drowning in the ocean. She was on a school trip when she fell through a blowhole in a cliff and down into the water below. Everyone stood there, watching her float out into the rough sea. Graham looked around, expecting someone from her group—an adult or a teacher—to jump in, but no one moved. He explained that many people in Ireland don’t know how to swim. Watching the girl wailing with fear and being swept farther out from shore, John and Graham quickly discussed who was the stronger swimmer. Clearly it was Graham, who had grown up in California and was endowed with an almost supernatural outdoorsy zeal. So while John and Jen, the girl’s teacher, and her classmates stood on the shore watching her flail about in the ice-cold water screaming for help, Graham took off his shoes and dived in to save her. When he reached her, she was as cold as a stone and had already given up, having gone down a few times. Graham grabbed her in a lifeguard hold. The waves crashed on the beach, threatening to toss them into the rocks if they got caught in the tide. Graham towed her to a small rock outcrop close to shore, and everyone started tying their clothing together, making a sort of wet, woolen towline to bring her back to shore. Graham became a local hero, made all the Irish newspapers, and would be receiving a citation and a medal from the mayor of the small town in Ireland from which the girl hailed.

  Stunned and impressed, I walked him to Banana Republic—telling all the people in the store why he needed new clothes; that his had been ruined rescuing a girl lost in the sea in Ireland.

  “He saved her life!” I exclaimed to the smiling saleswoman. I basically picked out his usual uniform—he was like the guy in The Fly in this regard—a few pairs of chinos, some oxfords, and a couple of sweaters. He put on some of his new duds; the rest were wrapped in tissue and put in shopping bags by the adoring cashier.

  “What an amazing thing you did! You are a brave man.” She beamed at him.

  We walked out of the store, and he placed his old clothes in the garbage can on the corner of Broadway.

  “Hey, you want to come over to my aunt’s place? It has a killer view of the park.”

  “Okay.”

  We took a taxi across town to his aunt’s; she was away someplace. The chichi building on Fifth Avenue had a uniformed doorman and shiny brass railings holding up a forest-green awning. I followed him through the apartment’s vast foyer into the dining room, where a long, gleaming wooden table was surrounded by stately upholstered chairs. The rambling prewar flat had way too many rooms, all decked out in WASPy, Scalamandré fabrics, chinoiserie, crystal, and antiques. Where Nina’s mom’s apartment had been an au courant, brick-and-glass, 1970s, new-money pad, this was old money, ever so tastefully displayed above the elegant front yard that was Central Park. I was beginning to understand how a “broke” Graham could get to Europe for the summer.

  He poured us each a large vodka, plopping ice cubes in from the bucket he had brought to the bar. The grown-up flat made me feel as if I were back in another time; the antiques, Persian rugs, and beautiful oil paintings reminded me of my childhood home at the Dakota. But I wasn’t a child anymore. What the hell was going on? I had broken up with this man four months ago, suffered his cubicle surveillance; he was an asshole, and now I was in someone else’s apartment, alone with him, with a giant tumbler of vodka in my hand in the afternoon.

  I was guessing that all of this was some kind of passive bid to get me back. But you never knew—especially with him. It might just be a friendly shopping trip followed by a drink at his aunt’s sumptuous pad. We talked about his trip, my horrible long summer. Then neither of us spoke for a moment. I walked over to the window to look out over the dusky light on Fifth Avenue and the trees beyond the low stone wall that encloses the park.

  “You know, when you marched in like a Trojan and proceeded to break up with me, I didn’t know if I should kill you or kiss you.”

  “I didn’t know what else to do. You were so indifferent to me.” I shrugged.

  He wordlessly took my glass from my hand and put it down on a side table and led me back to his bedroom. We didn’t talk. He pulled me down on top of him on the luxurious bedspread as it grew dark outside. We kissed, and I decided this probably didn’t mean anything. It was just easy, familiar.

  Seeing him again had made me miss him. But as we rolled around on the bed, rubbing against each other, I real­ized that despite what I thought or hoped—that saving the little girl had miraculously changed him into a different ­person—it hadn’t. I was the one who was open and offering myself to him, getting never quite enough in return because that’s all he had to give. It was the same old story played over again.

  “I think we should stop.” I got up and walked
back into the dining room. He followed me, and we went back to our vodkas, looking out across the street at the trees trembling under the streetlights.

  “I missed you,” he said. “I thought about you a lot.”

  Really? I wasn’t sure that he meant it, or if I could believe it. I had never felt beautiful with him—not once. He couldn’t accept my love or return it; something in him was broken.

  “Graham, I just don’t think we can ever be happy together,” I said to him in the dark room. “I can’t help but think that we’d both be better off with other people.”

  As my words faded from the air, I heard the slight whistle of his glass hurtling toward my head and then shattering on the window behind me. Glass, ice cubes, and vodka sluiced on the floor at my feet. I calmly put down my drink and walked out of the apartment.

  In the cab on the way home it hit me—the raggedy clothes he had worn to meet me. He wore the fucking torn, sea-stretched clothes from his gallant rescue over a week ago and thousands of miles away! As if he’d been wearing them all this time. As if they were the only clothes he owned and he needed help getting new ones. And I’d fallen for it. How dumb am I? I thought. Then I realized: not that dumb—the saleswomen at Banana Republic had been fawning all over him as well. The story of the rescue was true, but everything else was bullshit. Except for one undeniable fact: he had totally played me.

  • • •

  At the end of the summer, as we were all heading back to start our second year of conservatory, Allen, who’d been in the hospital for five months and hadn’t been improving, passed away. Many people, including his wife, blamed the theater and its staff for his demise. He’d been working too hard, it was too much of a strain—not only had he been teaching acting, he was also directing main-stage productions, including a nearly four-hour production of Hamlet. They had worked him to death. Crazy rumors about the ­theater’s having been built on a Native American burial ground started circulating among the students. All of the teachers whom Allen had brought with him refused to return, citing his harsh treatment at the hands of the administration. Ned would not be returning, either. Only Bonnie stayed—­everyone else would be new.

  With no one to lead the school and time running out, the administration pulled in a married couple from the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco—combat teacher J. Steven White, who would be running the school for a year while a search was conducted for a new head, and the leading ingenue of ACT—Annette Bening, who’d now be in the company in Denver.

  J. Steven was a swaggering macho guy who liked to quote Machiavelli and had a tendency toward malapropisms. He was short; perhaps this, combined with being married to the star actress in the company, made him overcompensate by being even more he-man in his behavior. On the first day, he made it clear that he thought we were all a bunch of babies, and—much worse—soft, out of shape. He was going to transform us into lean, mean acting machines by having us start aerobics. This was to make us strong, seriously buff, and would hopefully increase our lung capacity. And he was going to teach us all how to fight onstage. Toughen us up. Pussies can’t do Shakespeare, right?

  It was a one-eighty from our first year, where we lay on the floor a lot, softening our tongues and jaws, vocalizing, doing ballet, and delving into emotions and the senses in scene study and acting class. Soon we were all jumping up and down to bad synthesizer music, following the frenetic motions of a headbanded, Lycra-bound, relentlessly cheerful brunette whom J. Steven had brought all the way from California to teach us aerobics. She looked and behaved like a demented chipmunk, and just watching her ponytail whipping around her head made me dizzy. In our motley array of leg warmers, sweatpants, and ripped-up T’s, we looked as if we’d escaped from an audition for Flashdance.

  In combat class, we rolled around on mats, learning how to run into walls and pretend-punch and smack each other, then we moved on to fencing. I was horrible at all of this. I was terrified of hurting someone or, worse, losing a finger and therefore couldn’t commit to it enough to be convincing. The strongest fighter and fencer in our class was Anna. Anna fought as if she were going to kill you; it was thrilling to watch. She kicked some serious ass in that class, and how cool was it that our best combat student was a woman?

  We’d be doing three plays in class that year—a Shakespeare, a Chekhov, and a musical. Starting off with the Bard—J. Steven cobbled together parts of four plays in which the character of Queen Margaret appears—all three parts of Henry VI and bits of Richard III. He then divided Margaret’s lines among the women and cast the men in the other roles. Because Anna was the best fighter, she got to play the twisted Richard—I was so jealous, but she was fierce in her black leather jacket and gloves, looking like a demonic punk tearing up the stage. I, of course, played the young, innocent version of the princess, before she becomes queen; the sweet English rose.

  J. Steven came from the louder, faster, funnier school of directing. He would often tap on his watch while we were rehearsing, and say, “Get off, get off, get off, get off.” By the time he’d finished speaking, you had best exited the stage. Stanislavski and Alexander were tossed out the window, to be replaced by Jack LaLanne and Speedy Gonzales. We ended up performing the play in the Denver Center’s movie theater, running up and down the aisles, dodging pretend cannonballs. This all built up to what he called the “Hello, Dolly!” of sword fights. I did not lose my eyeballs, but there were a few close calls.

  Next up was Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters, directed by our new acting teacher, Archie. Archie, who looked worn-out because he was directing us in the play in addition to rehearsing at the theater, immersed us in the world of Chekhov. Why did people sit around talking in his plays? There was nothing else to do! No radio, television, and limited access to newspapers and mail. Talking was how everyone learned about what was happening in the village, politics, or the ­theater, and—in Chekhov—it’s how they fall in love.

  For J. Steven, the most important part of being in a Russian play was learning how to hold your vodka. Not only was he going to turn us into acting dynamos, he was going to teach us how to binge drink. The trick, he told us, was to have a little bite of something—fish, salted cucumber, or bread—in between each little glass. It was beginning to be a trend—getting blasted with our acting teachers.

  So we had a “research” Russian party, and J. Steven supplied the vodka. Someone passed out with their head in a closet, I remembered dancing on the dining-room table (but not much else), and JB, who hosted the party along with Anna, fell off a wall while getting some air outside and landed in a snowbank, the vodka glass still in his hand.

  Whether it was a talent for Chekov, or my ability to hold my liquor, I was enormously pleased when the casting went up for Three Sisters. I had been afraid of being, and expected to be, cast again in the younger-sister role, Irina, but instead I was cast as Natasha, a young woman who marries the sisters’ beloved brother and turns into a shrew. I was excited to play the meaty part, someone mean, provincial, and a bit stupid. Once rehearsals started, though, I found that playing such a bitch made my stomach hurt. For years afterward if I played an unsympathetic character, knowing that the ­audience—or some of them anyway—disliked me, I always felt slightly queasy. Although the hisses and boos proved I was doing my job well, it also made me feel like my mother, with her keen taste for cruelty and her self-serving machinations at other people’s expense.

  J. Steven’s wife, Annette, was often held up to us as a shining example of the consummate actor. She had what was coined at ACT “the thrilling voice,” and her technique was flawless. Watching her, you could see everything coming together to give an ace performance, but despite her skill I found her rather cold—I preferred to see someone willing to take risks, someone warmer and more emotional who put himself or herself out there. We all thought she was about as sexy as a stick of gum, so imagine our surprise when she showed up a few years later, buck naked,
playing a depraved con woman in a movie called The Grifters. I overheard one of the company actors say in a bar one night, “Well, J. Steven will be a good first husband for Annette.” I guessed that was true; she went on to become Mrs. Warren Beatty.

  Graham and I kept a civil distance from each other at school that year, and I went out with a lot of guys. Most of them were actors—I had yet to learn my lesson, and they were the only men I met. A tall, dark, and handsome leading man in the theater company courted me with chicken-fried-steak dinners, walks in the snow, gifts of books, and little trinkets such as feathers and seashells that he left in my mailbox. He was nine years older than me, and having sex with him was sort of like sleeping with an excited German shepherd. He would leap enthusiastically on top of me, his weight crushing my chest, and whip his head around while he climaxed, then emit this loud, self-satisfied sigh, as if he’d just won an Oscar for all his hard work. He was not wildly imaginative in the sack, but at least he was consistent. I felt like hot shit dating him and imagined our relationship increased my cachet in some way.

  We had fun—he took me to the Ringling Brothers circus, and we partied on the train afterward with some clown friends of his. It was all lovely until a few weeks after he’d gotten me into bed. The German shepherd became elusive, making excuses not to see me. I spotted him one night in a restaurant with a woman from my school who was a year behind me, a young, dewy thing who looked sixteen. She wore his sweater to class the next day. Feeling frantic and cast aside, I went a little crazy, driving past his house repeatedly at night. I wasn’t in love with him, I was just obsessed with the idea of his no longer wanting me. One evening, I threw a rock at his window to try to rouse him—the story was all over school the next day that I had hurled a brick through his window in a fit of rage. My mother had been a stalker; she had once even staked out her married lover’s house, sleeping in her car in the driveway until the housekeeper came out to tell her he was out of town. Was this where I was heading? The deranged, jilted woman from Play Misty for Me? Luckily, the German shepherd left on a yearlong tour shortly after the rock incident and saved me from having to confront this question more squarely.