Heart of Glass

by Wendy Lawless

  After he left, I began dating a guy in the class behind me whom I called Sweeney because every morning I woke up at his house, he’d put on the cast album of Sweeney Todd. Full blast. It didn’t last long, though I did knit him a sweater and gave it to him before I broke up with him as a consolation prize.

  Next came the flannel-clad, dour actor from the Pacific Northwest with acne-scarred skin and a chip on his shoulder about being short and having grown up poor. He had a rough-hewn charm, with his spartan flat, where everything was on the floor—the bed, the TV, his ashtray. He seemed to own nothing—he was like a monk whose religion was smoking cigarettes. At first, he bought me gifts—a copy of The Joy of Cooking and a beautiful vintage pin. Then, after telling me I was “oversexed” (because I liked to do it more than once a month and not only in the missionary position), he dumped me, claiming I was too needy.

  I hadn’t set out to be the school siren, but by the end of my second year at NTC I’d slept with over twice as many men as in all my previous years of dating combined. I didn’t know if I had changed—become bolder as a person and an actor—or if I simply had more opportunity. I’d had my heart stomped on or twisted and torn, but most often I’d cut and run before that could happen. I didn’t know what I’d learned or garnered in these entanglements. I was just as devastated by Mr. Flannel’s cruel assessment of me as I had been by Oedipus’s casual dismissal of my pregnancy. Blindsided by Ned and wising up just in time with Graham, I didn’t feel any closer to knowing what I wanted or needed in a relationship or what love meant. Perhaps, I reasoned, my mother’s crazy love life wasn’t all the ravings of a psychotic seductress—maybe some of it was just the desperation that comes with wanting love but not finding it. Whatever the answer was, it seemed that Boston’s J. Geils Band had one thing right—love stinks.

  chapter ten

  CRIMES OF THE HEART

  I was determined not to spend another lonely, deathly dull summer in cow town. Luckily, I was offered a summer gig at a small theater in Westerly, Rhode Island, doing the Beth Henley play Crimes of the Heart. My married NTC classmates John and Jen would be in the cast also, along with two other actresses being brought in from New York. The pay was small, but I jumped at the chance. I could be close to Manhattan, my sister in Boston, and friends—and I’d get to spend some time in a pretty New England coastal town. I gave up my apartment in Denver, put my junk in storage, and flew to New York to hang out at Ninety-seventh Street before rehearsals started.

  Jenny and Pete were living in Buffalo these days, where Pete was doing his residency. But Jenny’s brother Dave took up residence in the apartment on Ninety-seventh Street with his girlfriend, a flame-haired, zaftig, brainy beauty named Della, as well as a friend of Jenny’s from Barnard, Martha, leaving my old room available. I thought of Jenny as another sister and Dave, whom I’d known since he was fifteen, as a brother. So even though I’d only lived at Ninety-seventh Street for maybe twelve months if you added all the stays together, I felt that I was home for the summer like any other kid from school.

  Dave had graduated from the French Culinary Institute and was working for a hot young chef named David Bouley at the new restaurant-of-the-moment, Montrachet. There, Dave was the poissonnier, or fish chef, but was taking the summer off, with Bouley’s blessing, to hone his skills apprenticing at Roger Vergé’s famous restaurant on the Côte d’Azur, Moulin de Mougins. So Della was throwing Dave a going-away party, a big one—the kind of party you have in your twenties where you tell everyone to tell everyone and before you know it, your nine-hundred-square-foot apartment has three thousand square feet of people in it, most of whom you’ve never met.

  The front doorbell of the building rang so often, we just left the door propped open. The fridge was packed with Budweiser, and industrial quantities of gin and tonics fizzed in pitchers and vases in the kitchen. Everyone was hot and sweaty, and Django Reinhardt, Charlie Christian, and Fats Waller records on the stereo helped with the sway.

  It was a marvelous party, every room packed to the rafters. The only thing missing to make it perfect were Jenny and Pete. Then, at midnight, a strange couple arrived with a noisy fanfare, the woman sort of braying and tossing her hair, and the man executing bizarre kung-fu moves. In their early twenties they were decked out in tight, cheap clothes. Her purple hair fell sloppily around her pasty face, her eyes were done raccoon-style with a ton of kohl, and her red lipstick was smeared across her cheek as if they’d just had furious sex in the elevator on the way up. He was wearing black spandex pants, which left little to the imagination, no shirt, and a limp, gold vest like a reject from the slutty Ice Capades with ratty white Nikes instead of skates. He was shorter than she was and had jaw-length, feathered, dirty-blond hair that hung stringily from his head. They both smelled as if they hadn’t bathed in a month, opting instead to walk through the mistings of department-store perfume sprayers or to rub under their arms with those little tree-shaped air fresheners that hang from cabbies’ rearview mirrors. Almost immediately, the odd couple ran in to Dave and Della’s bedroom and began jumping on the bed. We crowded in after them to watch. The girl wasn’t wearing anything beneath her tight pleather skirt, which flew up, revealing her dimply white thighs and that the furry patch between her legs had been dyed to match her hair. The guy started licking her face—it was like a bad Coney Island act or a scene from a John Waters movie. Who were they? What were they doing here?

  “Thank God, the drugs have arrived!” someone shouted over my shoulder.

  Cheers erupted throughout, and suddenly a crush of people pressed into the room behind us. I found myself wedged in between or—given their height—under an old friend of Pete’s, Jay, a sort of dark hippie with a demonic surfeit of facial hair, and a black guy named Dwon in ­leopard-print pants and no shirt who worked either at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice or a hair salon, I was never sure.

  Our pushers started dispensing little white pills. Apparently, a friend of Martha’s, an aspiring lawyer, had arranged for sixty hits of ecstasy for Dave’s bon voyage. I stood in a mass of people all holding out their hands like beggars or congregants at a bizarre communion rail. The first sixty of us got a hit, and the stragglers were out of luck.

  Their work done, the spandex twins cavorted out the door with a couple of beers to go, never to be seen again.

  I had never taken ecstasy—not yet illegal, it was being used at that time mostly by therapists trying to unlock their patients’ inhibitions, so it was considered a “truth” drug. I was a little afraid, turning the small tablet over in my hand. I hadn’t experimented with that many drugs but, Oh, fuck it, I thought, and swallowed it down. A bunch of us sat on the dining-room floor, waiting for it to take effect.

  Slowly at first, then suddenly, the ecstasy hit us each like a wave. People got up and ran around the room, then we were holding on to each other, then laughing our asses off. Someone came running in from the bathroom with a fistful of toothbrushes.

  “Try brushing your teeth! It’s incredible!”

  Even doing something as mundane as teeth cleaning became a wild sensory experience. You could feel the bristles massaging the inside of your mouth, like those huge soapy brushes in the car wash—but it was in your mouth and tasted better. Other things tasted weird: beer, orange juice, gin. Suddenly water was the most wonderful beverage in the world. The more mundane, the more ordinary the experience or substance, the better it felt under the drug’s influence. Kissing was better than having sex. Strangers started petting each other, stroking each other’s faces as the party spilled out of the apartment and up the stairs to the roof. People stood transfixed by the dark, undulating surface of the Hudson River and the glancing slivers of silver light from cars driving on the West Side Highway and across the river in New Jersey. Guys were driving golf balls off the roof into Riverside Park, and the rest of us hugged and declared our love for one another, recounting first meetings rapturously. To the so
ber or merely drunk person, I can only imagine that it looked like a party of overgrown preschoolers experiencing the world and each other for the first time. For us, it was a lovefest.

  At one point, Dave came over to me and said, “See that guy over there?” He pointed to a skinny young man on the far side of the party with blond hair combed back against his head, making his nose look even bigger than it was, as if he were flaunting it or something. He was dressed in a white shirt, white trousers, and black espadrilles, leaning against a wall, smoking a Marlboro Red. His name was David, and he was a friend of Della’s, a boyfriend of one of her roommates from Smith, who was in town visiting from Philly.

  “Yeah.” I nodded. I’d always had a thing for guys with big noses—Gabriel Byrne, Pete Townshend, the actor who played him in the Quadrophenia movie, Phil Daniels.

  “Why don’t you go over there and be nice to him. His girlfriend just dumped him.”

  “Sure. Okay.”

  I navigated the crowded room and asked him for a cigarette. And that was it.

  We spent the rest of the night and into the morning talking as the ecstasy surged through our brains: on the couch, on the stairs, on a blanket on the roof watching the stars; at one point, every other room being packed with people, we sat on the edge of the bathtub for a good thirty minutes just talking. He was from Philadelphia, but his parents now lived in Ohio. He’d gone to Penn and was helping to run a catering company a friend had started as a student; he’d lived in London. I can’t remember what I told him about myself. Somehow, it wasn’t what we said that was important, it was just . . . the connection we seemed to have, something spoken through our eyes maybe, or the supersensitive touch of our fingers. Maybe it was the drugs.

  Dawn found us in each other’s arms dancing slowly across the chipped parquet floor of the dining room while Django Reinhardt played Kurt Weill’s “September Song.” Half-naked partygoers stumbled out of bedrooms or down from the roof. A bearded imp of a man wearing only a sheet sat on the couch playing a guitar with only one string he’d found in one of the closets. Dwon, the criminal-justice scholar or hairdresser, walked out of the kitchen with a white dress shirt on but his trousers gone—replaced by a pair of leopard bikini underwear. David and I walked to the bodega down the street for cigarettes and on our way back found Dave and four other guys sitting on the front stoop in 1960s prom dresses, also from one of the apartment’s magical closets, drinking beers and smoking while Della photographed them. We kissed everyone good morning, went upstairs to my tiny room, and fell asleep for a few hours, clutched together in my single bed.

  That afternoon, we had our first date. David said he had enough money for some mediocre food or two exceptional cocktails, so we walked from Ninety-seventh Street all the way down to One Fifth Avenue and its eponymous bar, One Fifth, just up from Washington Square Park in the Village. I hadn’t been back to this part of town since I’d been a miserable film student at NYU. That Wendy felt like another person from another planet. David and I pushed open the doors and entered a hallway with gleaming-white tile walls, teak paneling, brass portholes, and other nautical trim salvaged from an ocean liner. The first room on the left held a white-marble bar backed by mirrors facing the large windows that looked out onto the street. Pressed against the far wall, between an assortment of potted palms, a jazz trio—piano, bass, and electric guitar—played to a smattering of early customers. We got a table. Having talked all night and as we’d walked halfway down the island of Manhattan, now we just sat and listened to the music and smoked. It was easy. Right. Just as we took the first sip of two very nice martinis, the band started playing “The Girl from Ipanema”—one of the iconic songs of my childhood I’d fallen asleep to while my mother entertained in the living room of our Park Avenue apartment. I associated the song with the clinking of ice in crystal, and the laughter of grown-ups, the glamour of my mother’s youth and a New York that was long gone.

  David took my hand. “Would you like to dance?”

  I looked around. No one was dancing. There was no dance floor or even space for it.

  “Come on. You obviously love the song.”

  We got up and glided through the other tables to the grand piano, and then we danced in its hollow. It seemed, just as it had the night before, that when we were together, there were only the two of us. I had never before felt such a pull toward another human being—an almost gravitational force that told me we belonged together. We finished our dance and our martinis and walked ninety blocks back home singing every song from Roxy Music’s album Avalon. When we got back to the apartment, we went straight to my room and ripped each other’s clothes off, laughing as we got naked and rolled onto the bed. We made love with our eyes open, mouths devouring each other’s body—sweet and tender one moment, fiery wrestling the next. Afterward we lay in each other’s arms, listening to our hearts beating.

  The following weekend I took the train down to Philly to visit him. He didn’t have a car, so he picked me up at 30th Street Station in a big white van that belonged to his boss at the catering company. Our first stop was DiLullo Centro, a spectacular bar and restaurant in Center City, to meet his friend Merritt, who worked for Bonwit Teller, and her mom, Alison, who ran Saks in Philadelphia. We drank Prosecco and ordered fried calamari, which—I didn’t want to say for fear of appearing like a rube—I had never had. I vaguely remembered having octopus sometime during my childhood, at a restaurant in Harlem where my mother, during her Radical Chic phase in her sheath dress and circle pin, had met with the Young Lords, a Puerto Rican street gang turned militant civil rights group who were squatting in a church nearby. Mother’s meeting with the gang didn’t produce anything more than a good cocktail-party story, and the octopus came right back up in the taxi on the way home.

  Unaware that calamari and octopus are in the same family, I daintily selected a piece and ate it up. Back in the borrowed van about ten minutes after we’d left the bar, I turned to David. “I know we don’t know each other that well, but I’m about to be violently ill.”

  I frantically crank-rolled the window down and barfed my brains out. Vomit flew across the expressway as people stared at the girl in the nice black dress, hanging out of the van window throwing up like mad. Tears stung my eyes, and puke streaked the side of the van below my gushing mouth.

  “Oh my God, are you okay? Should we go to the hospital?” He kept glancing over at me while dodging fifty-mile-an-hour traffic.

  My stomach finally empty, I pulled my head back inside the van and nodded and shook my head awkwardly at him, adding that I’d be fine. Wary of the drive he’d planned out to a trendy riverside neighborhood called Manayunk, he decided to take me to a place he knew in Chinatown called Joe’s Peking Duck for some wonton soup and Coca-Colas. “It’s medicinal,” he said.

  On our way home to his place in West Philadelphia after our therapeutic Chinese food, we drove up South Street, a strip of cheap clothing stores, bars, and cheesesteak places—Philly’s own little Greenwich Village. This muggy summer a garbage strike was on, but the van didn’t have air-­conditioning, so we rode with the windows down. Stopped in South Street traffic, we heard a saxophone. I looked over and saw the door to a dive bar called Bob and Barbara’s Bonfire was open, and way in the back, an African American man in a white suit wailed away on an alto sax—sending its fluttering rasp out into the hot night. We exchanged a quick look, and David drove the van up onto a heaping pile of trash, covered the boom box—the radio was broken—with some newspapers, and we headed over to Bob and Barbara’s.

  It was dark and crowded inside. A cigarette machine selling Pall Malls, Kools, Salems, and Philip Morris Commanders was just inside the door, next to a long, dark-wood bar with a white Formica top that ran along the left side of the room until it bent back on itself at the opposite end forming a J. Small tables lined the opposite wall, creating a narrow path into the long room. The tables held black, molded ashtrays and candl
es in teardrop-shaped holders encased in plastic netting. A muted kung-fu movie played on a TV mounted on the wall over the bar. The band that had lured us in played at the end of the room against a fake-wood-paneled wall, where the light from a potato-chip machine cast an eerie glow on the drummer. In addition to the drummer and the saxophonist, an older African American woman played the organ with a tall glass beside her music stand. She was wearing a lilac-colored pantsuit and reading glasses on a gold chain around her neck.

  We were halfway down the bar when David and I realized that we were the only white people in the place. David was wearing a seersucker jacket and white bucks, making him seem even whiter than he was already. As we moved along the bar, the bartender moved in the opposite direction. We stopped and tried to order a drink. The bartender ignored us, turning away. I started to feel a bit nervous, and after a full five minutes of waiting for the bartender to turn around and acknowledge us, I suggested that we leave and find another place.

  David shook his head. “Listen to that sax, Wendy!”

  He lit a Marlboro, placed it in one of the slots in the dirty ashtray on the bar, and planted himself on a stool. I sat down next to him. Another five minutes went by, and although the sax was amazing, I still felt uneasy at our lack of a welcome.

  “C’mon, David, I don’t think he’s gonna serve us.” I tugged on his sleeve to go.

  “Sure he will.” David smoked and watched the organist riff on a passage of “Green Dolphin Street.”