She picked up the check. I wondered if she was just being nice; maybe she felt sorry for me being my mother’s daughter—a woman she’d always despised. I drove her to the airport and said I’d be heading back to the city toward the end of the summer.
“Call me when you’re settled, Gwendolyn.” She had taken to calling me this recently. I nodded and hugged her good-bye at the gate. I knew she would look out for me—for whatever reason. She was tough, loyal, and brash—good qualities in an agent. And in a friend.
chapter eleven
THE UNSINKABLE WENDY LAWLESS
Jenny and Pete were getting married.
Their wedding was to be in Cornwall, Connecticut, a beautiful, largely unspoiled, and empty corner of Litchfield County. A low-key location at the time, in ten years it would be overrun by celebrities and famous newsmen. Jenny had lived there on and off throughout her childhood, and her grandparents Bill and Buela had a house there where we all stayed when we visited. An old, low-ceilinged house built into a hillside in the 1700s, it was crammed with large antiques and dusty brocade sofas. I usually slept on the top one of the three floors. If I wasn’t lucky enough to snag a room, a bed on the landing was usually empty, wedged Hobbit-like under the stairs to the attic. The house was surrounded by Buela’s gorgeous rambling garden. She was especially proud of her lilac bushes, which she liked to say were so tall and beautiful because she made Bill piss on them from an upstairs window after parties.
The service would be at the white clapboard church in town, with the reception—a large dinner dance—held afterward in a nearby barn belonging to old family friends. Even though Jenny was a staunch feminist atheist, a church wedding went with the long white lace dress and picture hat she had chosen to wear. She’d spent months with Martha Stewart’s newly published Weddings book under her arm—obsessing over flower arrangements and silverware patterns, fussing over every detail, determined to have a perfect day. It was as if, quite suddenly, she’d become a grown-up, taking on all the concerns that grown-ups in the movies had. I’d thought that none of these conventions were supposed to matter anymore, but suddenly, it seemed they did. And even though I was thrilled for her, I felt I was losing a race I hadn’t even known I was running.
The guests—over two hundred of them—started pouring in. Pete arrived with his family, a swarm of Homers: his mom, brothers, sisters, respective girl and boy friends, uncles, aunts, and cousins. Jenny was to be walked down the aisle by both her parents, John and Phyllis, who were divorced but appeared to have an amicable relationship, which seemed modern and civilized to me, as well as completely unlike my mother’s slash-and-burn style of breakup and divorce. The only place I could see my parents coming together was at a crime scene in which one of them, probably my dad, would be dead.
I was to be a bridesmaid, as Jenny had promised her best friend in fourth grade that they would be each other’s maid of honor. Having lived my younger life moving around, leaving many chums behind, this kind of pledge and long-lived friendship seemed inconceivable—even alien—to me. Friends, to me, were the people who were there for you in the moment, so I was a bit hurt by this interloper from Jenny’s past. I decided to approach bridesmaid as a role; I wasn’t the lead, or the “best friend,” but at least I was in the chorus.
The morning of the wedding, the bridesmaids all dressed in an upstairs bedroom at Buela’s house. I had bought a pair of grayish-cream-colored pumps to wear, as instructed by Jenny, and had worried that they weren’t the right shade, but luckily I passed inspection. I pulled on my tea-length, long-sleeved, minty-green-and-pink floral Laura Ashley number. Checking myself out in the mirror on the door, I thought I looked a bit like a chintz-covered armchair and wondered whether—if I stuck around after the wedding was over—I could live there at Buela’s, pretending to be an ottoman.
We arrived at the church all together; it was a hellishly hot day, and as I was almost completely covered in fabric, I began to broil. Standing outside the church before the walk down the aisle and feeling faint from the heat, I had to sit down on the church steps with my head between my legs. Somebody brought me a lukewarm Sprite to sip on, and I started to feel good and sorry for myself. I wasn’t getting married, I didn’t have a boyfriend, and I had unceremoniously been dumped by the man I’d believed to be “the one.” Jenny’s wedding was all about me, the single bridesmaid, right?
This was only the second wedding I’d ever been to, the first being my mother’s marriage to Pop in the Dakota when I was seven. I had coughed all through that ceremony, which ended up being a bad omen, since the marriage only lasted eighteen months. I didn’t cough this time, but I did tear up listening to Jenny and Pete take their vows. Amazing, I thought, that these two people, whom I loved so much, had found each other and wanted to be together forever. How could they be so sure? Would I ever meet a guy I didn’t have doubts over? I was twenty-seven—where was my Pete?
The rings on, Jenny and Pete kissed, and they turned to greet us for the first time as a married couple. We all clapped and cheered as organ music swelled, and we followed them up the aisle and out of the church. Looking at the backs of their heads, as they squeezed hands, smiled, and whispered to each other, I felt a curious mixture of both joyous euphoria and a pain like having an arm cut off at the elbow. My best friend was moving on, and I was happy for her and happy to see them so happy, but I also felt I was losing them and was lost myself.
I decided to handle my mixed feelings as maturely as possible and drink heavily at the reception. Luckily, two different men obliged by chatting me up—one of them I knew from visits to Cornwall. His parents owned the barn and the old farmhouse across from it in addition to a palatial penthouse apartment on the Upper West Side I’d visited a few times. It was the kind of flat where the elevator opened into the foyer, and the buttery-wood floors led to a terrace that ran along the entire side of the apartment. The other potential suitor was the older brother of a girl I’d gone to Town School with in New York in the late sixties; I’d gone to his sister’s eighth birthday party in their cavernous apartment on York Avenue, where they screened a sixteen-millimeter print of A Dog of Flanders and we played musical chairs and pin the tail on the donkey.
Both nice-looking, smart, and from privileged families, they were your basic preppy-prince types. I decided to send them both to the bar to get me a drink. The first one back got me. I would have denied it had anyone pointed it out, but I was behaving exactly like my mother, who always played multiple boyfriends against each other. Of course Mother was an expert, exacting trips, jewelry, and cars from her champions. At Jenny’s reception, I was just a drunk amateur feeling sorry for myself. The brother of my childhood classmate never returned from the bar. I told myself that he was clearly frightened of my raw vagina power, but at the time he probably guessed at my little contest offering myself as the door prize. So the other one, Zander, the inheritor of all this prime real estate, won by forfeit.
We danced our asses off to the deejay until ten thirty, when it started to pour rain. We were bopping around to Springsteen’s “Dancing in the Dark” when suddenly the electricity cut out, and we were all plunged into darkness. After some squeals of laughter, people lit candles, and someone started singing “Amazing Grace.” Zander took my hand, and we ran into the dark garden on a slope below the barn. While we pushed our tongues into each other’s mouth, I used the hand not around his neck to remove my panties and toss them into the bushes like a dueling glove. Laughing, we dashed to his house across the way, climbing the stairs up to an empty room in the attic with wall-to-wall carpeting and no furniture. We were both soaking wet and pretty hammered, but that just emboldened me to take charge and shag his brains out. Feeling Superwoman powerful from all the booze, I ripped his clothes off and threw him onto the floor. I was pretty sure by his reaction that no one had ever done that before. He’d never been with a bad girl like me. I got off on what a good time I was showing him; I was on t
op of Zander when a man walked in on us—a drunken, lost wedding guest—but I didn’t care. I heard the soft mumbling of apology, and the door shut. I continued on my mission to burn this guy to a cinder with sex, to smote him.
“Oh my God,” he moaned. “You’re amazing.”
Good, I thought. And, yes, I am.
Afterward, he loaned me an L.L. Bean long-sleeved striped T-shirt and a pair of his sister’s jeans, and we went to check out a party where Pete’s family was crashing in another big, borrowed house down the road. There were wall-to-wall Homers, drinking Barrilito rum that someone had brought back from a Puerto Rican vacation, and the air was sweet with the smell of weed. We had a pop or two, then drove to a lake in an old, beat-up Volvo station wagon and found another party going on in and around the boathouse. Plenty of people were skinny-dipping, but it was too cold and dark for me. I sat on the dock, hugging my legs, listening to the cicadas strumming along to the screams and shouts of delight coming from the water.
In the morning, at Zander’s house, I changed back into my Laura Ashley dress, neatly folding the jeans and placing them on a chair in the corner. I thought about stealing the shirt—it was one of those French sailor tops that had been washed a hundred times until it was impossibly soft and perfectly worn. It was the kind of shirt your boyfriend lets you wear, like a love badge, I thought, as I moved my fingers along the ever-so-gently-frayed neckline. But Zander wasn’t my boyfriend, and I left the shirt on top of the jeans.
I sneaked downstairs, hoping that anyone who saw me would think that I had just crashed in a bed someplace. A breakfast spread was laid out on the kitchen table—coffee, bagels, lox from Zabar’s. Feeling as if rocks were exploding inside my head, I chugged a glass of orange juice and poured myself some coffee. Zander came into the room, looking nervous, and pulled me into a corner. Through the window over the sink, I could see his mom and dad with sundry guests on the porch.
“Hi,” I said, and took a sip of my coffee—any liquid crucial at that moment.
“Hi, listen, Wendy, I don’t want you to get the wrong idea about last night.” He checked outside to make sure his folks were out of earshot.
“Oh, um, okay.” I wasn’t sure what he meant. I was too busy trying not to appear monumentally hungover.
“It’s just that I’m not looking for a girlfriend. I mean, I don’t want to hurt your feelings or anything—I just want to be straight with you.”
“Sure, I get it.”
At first, I thought it was cute as hell of him to think I even wanted to be his girlfriend. Then I felt pissed—he was acting as if I wanted to marry him or something, after what was essentially a one-night stand.
“I’m not interested in a long-term relationship.” He nodded solemnly at me, as if I’d applied for the job and didn’t get it. I hadn’t been thinking about a relationship, either, but suddenly wondered, What is wrong with me? Was it because I didn’t have a WASPy-enough patina—my name wasn’t Muffy or Soshie, and I didn’t dress like those sweater girls in their clogs and turtlenecks? And here’s the kicker: I’d thought I had had the power, that I was using him, but I was just a girl who drank too much and was good for a lay in an unfurnished attic. In seconds my power was gone, the victory vanquished by words, attitude, dismissal. The front I put up, the one that kept everyone from knowing about the crazy home life my sister and I had led with our mother for years, didn’t protect me from anything. I wrestled with what I can only guess was the same kind of hurt and insult that drove my mother’s fury—her dump-them-first, take-no-prisoners romantic philosophy.
“Well, I’m not, either, so you don’t have to worry,” I said, smiling a tad too brightly where Mother would have used an icy stare, and feeling humiliated, I walked out onto the porch to say good morning to everyone else.
• • •
Jenny and Pete left for their honeymoon, and I moved back into in my old room on Ninety-seventh Street, settling into the life of an unemployed actress with Jenny’s brother Dave and his new girlfriend, Molly, as roomies. After having helped build the restaurant, Dave was now working insane hours as a sous chef at Bouley in Tribeca and seemed to never be home. Molly worked days at an advertising firm. Since they hardly saw one another, they wrote to each other about their days in a journal that was usually on the long dining-room table. Sweet, yes, but yet another example of two people navigating the difficulties of an adult relationship while I watched from the audience.
As I attempted to launch my acting career, auditioning, and looking for some kind of a gig to pay my rent and bills, Didi became my savior. In addition to being my agent and opening many doors for me professionally, she also fed me dinner a few times a week at her apartment and hired me to temp at her office or to babysit. Her daughter, a happy and magical four-year-old named Ali, reminded me of a little fairy you’d find in a garden. Didi’s looking out for me made a big difference in my life, after years of what seemed like my drifting around. It was like climbing into a familial life raft in the wreckage of our parents’ multiple marriages, divorces, and the flotsam of ex-step-, step-, and half siblings strewn across the city and the country.
Didi got me an interview for a day job waitressing in an executive dining room at Teachers Insurance Company on Third Avenue in Midtown. The boss was her soon-to-be-second ex-husband’s girlfriend—a descriptive phrase that few people outside of Didi’s and my families could appreciate. The girlfriend hired me pretty much on sight and gave me a uniform to wear—a shiny, polyester black dress with a white Peter Pan collar and an attached white apron, like a chambermaid in a French farce.
The dining room was a perfect gig for an actress because it was over by two in the afternoon, so I was free to go to auditions after work. I was the youngest person there by far. The other waitresses were all lifers, all in their late sixties—the kind of world-weary broads played by Thelma Ritter or Selma Diamond who seem to be gone from the city now. The second-youngest person was Mo, who was around forty and had been an actor in 1970s, downtown–New York experimental theater. He’d worked at La MaMa, knew Janis Joplin, and once threw Allen Ginsberg out of the house for hitting on his friends at a party.
“Jesus, I tossed that fucking bum out on his ass! I didn’t give a shit who he was—he was bothering my guests!” Mo crinkled his nose and made a bad-smell face. His voice was deep, with the raspy gravel of a lifetime smoker and the jaded inflection of a hepcat.
Mo was originally from San Diego and had grown up in a succession of bars that his crazy, drunk mom ran. His dad had taken off when he was a kid; his mother, like mine, had a string of boyfriends, whom Mo called his “uncles.” He was rakishly handsome, tall and slender, with light brown curly hair and a mustache. Off work, he’d don a sheepskin coat and black cowboy boots and tie a red bandanna around his neck, lighting a cigarette on his way out of the building, looking as if he’d just walked out of Midnight Cowboy. He liked to swear, smoke, and drink. We got along great and soon became partners in crime at work. He was incredibly sweet to the crusty, old-broad waitresses, often going to their houses or churches on the weekend to help them with some chore that their husbands could no longer do—stringing up Christmas lights or moving the china cabinet. Their husbands were geezers who seemed to be permanently attached to Barcaloungers, watching old reruns on TV. Among his many other good deeds, he also protected me from Jean, the Bahamian cook who was always putting curses on me. I was terrified of her.
“You little white devil,” Jean’d hiss if I so much as looked in her direction, waving her huge spatula in the air, her big, crazy eyes zeroing in on me and making goose bumps pop up on the tops of my arms.
“C’mon, Jean, cut the crap! She’s just a kid, for Christ sakes, stop with the voodoo bullshit,” he’d holler over the din of clacking dishes and silverware. Then he’d wink at me.
Mo lived in a one-room, rent-controlled apartment across from the Barrymore Theatre on Forty-seventh Stree
t. The room was filled with puppets and a folded-up, brightly painted wooden theater he’d taken to South America when he’d saved up enough for a ticket, to do shows for little kids there. It was like entering a magical kingdom, although there was barely room to sit down because every available space was dedicated to pieces of scenery and marionettes. We’d sit in his apartment, and he’d tell me incredible stories, such as how he once sneaked a bottle of vodka into the hospital for his friend Nicholas Ray, the famous film director—“He was dying, the poor bastard, so I took him a drink!”—or about running away from home at sixteen and hitchhiking to Northern California with his girlfriend to try to find Jack Kerouac. “We never found him.” Mo exhaled a funnel of cigarette smoke and sipped his glass of Chablis.
I adored Mo because he was like someone from another time: a modern-day beatnik. He’d moved to New York, like me, with a couple of dollars in his pocket to pursue his dreams. It seemed to me that he had truly lived the life of an artist and still was. He was an inspiration to me, and a kindred spirit. We worked our day jobs, paid cheap rent, and weren’t trapped in the economy of the city. This made it possible for us to do our thing.
One of my first auditions after landing back in New York was for Miranda in The Tempest at a theater in Tucson, Arizona. I put on one of the dresses Didi had helped me pick out, and I loaded up the voluminous faux-leather tote bag I’d bought on the street that I carted all my actor shit around in—a bottle of water, a book to read on the subway, my Walkman, any play or sides I was auditioning for. Taking my cue from the young women in suits I saw dashing around the city, soon to be immortalized by Melanie Griffith’s character in the movie Working Girl, I wore sneakers to walk around, then I’d change into my dress shoes when I got there. The sidewalks of New York could trash your best pair of heels in a day. The audition was in one of those ratty rehearsal-hall buildings in the Fifties near Eleventh Avenue. I strode purposefully down the trash-strewn street, politely avoiding eye contact with the chicks-with-dicks prostitutes working the early shift in their fake-fur jackets and hot pants.
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