Heart of Glass

by Wendy Lawless

  One weekend when I’d taken the train out to Speonk, I was sitting by the pool with a friend of Isaac’s—a world-weary Italian woman, Gia, who was married to Isaac’s business associate. She had incredible taste, looked like a thinner Sophia Loren, and had an adorable little girl who was splashing in the pool with Eli.

  “So,” she said in her beautifully accented English, “are you going to marry Isaac? He is crazy for you, I think.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. We’ve never talked about it.” Isaac and Luca, Gia’s husband, sat out of earshot drinking beers with their pants rolled up and their feet in the water, keeping an eye on the kids.

  “He is a good man and he cares for you. You should marry him.”

  “Well, first, he hasn’t asked me, and second, I’m not in love with him.”

  “So what if you do not love him? You will be rich!” She dismissed me with a wave of her hand.

  Isaac was a good boyfriend, someone who treated me well, appreciated me for me. I was determined to just enjoy an even-keeled relationship for a change. We had no great passion, but we were fond of each other and made each other laugh. And the sex was great. Slowly, I had begun to wonder if Isaac was it—the one for me. I had been around, slept with a lot of guys, broken some hearts, and been dumped big-time. I was twenty-eight, and Isaac felt like my first adult relationship, in which I wasn’t constantly putting my ego on the line. He liked me the way I was and saw me in a way that many other men hadn’t. He respected me and treated me with concern and kindness. We were perfect . . . except that I wasn’t in love with him. But maybe true romance wasn’t in the cards for me. If I married him, I’d be very comfortable—like my actress girlfriends who could afford to work for lousy money or not to have day jobs because they had trust funds or rich husbands. And I’d be a stepmom to Eli, whom I loved. I had never thought about having a child before, but maybe we could have one together and give Eli a little brother or sister.

  The summer was winding down; the weekends in the Hamptons ended when Isaac closed up the house and started a new, high-profile job at a firm in Midtown. He was still slipping me an occasional twenty for lunch and subway money and had kindly paid my rent one month when I was completely skint.

  “Don’t worry about it,” he’d shushed me when I told him I felt guilty taking the $300. “You can pay me back . . . someday, okay? Or you know, we can work it out in sexual favors.” He grinned and wiggled his eyebrows.

  “All right. Thanks.” I felt like a loser. A grateful loser, but a loser nonetheless.

  “And cheer up! I’ll take you out to dinner someplace tonight. All right?”

  I nodded.

  Even Robbie asked me why I didn’t marry him. She thought he was sweet and that his helplessness in practical matters and in the kitchen was endearing. “He’s crazy about you. And think of all those guys Mother went out with. The ones we dreamed she’d marry.”

  It was true. Our mother had had a seemingly endless line of suitors—admen, TV writers, heirs to industrial fortunes and patrician estates—who always wanted to marry her. As little girls being tossed about in her wake through New York and London and the rest of Europe, we’d dreamed of settling down with any number of them into a “normal” and “secure” family life. We’d even sing “If Mama Was Married” from Gypsy to each other. But she never said yes. The only great romance of her life seemed to have been with our ex-stepfather, Pop, Didi’s dad, and the best years of that relationship occurred after their divorce and with an ocean between them. As for all the others, I was beginning to wonder now if the answer had been simple all along: she wasn’t in love with them.

  So despite Isaac’s kindness and sense of humor and generosity, I broke up with him. Sitting in plush, powder-blue velvet armchairs at his club, nursing old-fashioneds, I told him that I thought we should break up.

  “What?” He sputtered. “Why?”

  “Because we’re not in love.”

  “But, we have fantastic sex.” He reached over and squeezed my knee.

  “I want to be in love. I want that in my life.”

  “Okay.” He looked a trifle deflated but certainly not devastated. “I think you’re making a mistake. You’ll miss me,” he said slyly.

  “I know. It’s been wonderful. I’m just ready for . . . something else.”

  • • •

  After the breakup and bereft of easy twenties from Isaac, I picked up a coat-check-girl job at a French bistro near my apartment, a place called Poiret. I worked for tips and could make a $100 on a good night. But I found the job ­humiliating—coat check felt even more invisible than a hostess. I would stand in front of the coatrack and hand out numbers to the customers, take their perfumed furs or camel Aquascutums or Burberry raincoats, then watch them eat at white-linen-covered tables and drink too much. One evening ICM mega-agent Sam Cohn came in with his client/lover Dianne Wiest. He was so drunk he fell right on top of me as I was helping him with his coat. Mortified, he gave me a $50 tip before dashing out into the night. But I was just as embarrassed to be in the coat check instead of acting, and to need the fifty so badly, and to have to spend some of it on new stockings because his fall had caused a big run in mine.

  I was still auditioning, but I hadn’t landed even a one-day spot on a soap in months. I would trudge back to my illegal sublet after tryouts, temping, or standing in the Kafkaesque lines at unemployment, the post office, or the grocery store and go to sleep, even if it was only five thirty in the afternoon. The city made me so tired—even a small thing, like an errand to pick up sides or drop off my laundry, took it out of me. I felt that New York was winning, and I wasn’t getting anywhere.

  Then early one evening when I wasn’t checking coats, I came home—sleep on my mind—to find David, my summer romance from three years before, sitting on my front stoop with his bicycle.

  “What are you doing here?” I was a bit cranky after another fruitless day fighting the city. My feet hurt, and I just wanted to veg and watch some TV, not be visited by ghosts of broken hearts past.

  “I got your address from Dave and I was in the neighborhood, so I thought I’d stop by,” he said as if it were no big deal.

  I didn’t believe him, he wasn’t that good an actor. He looked like a runaway extra from an Evelyn Waugh novel with the bicycle, a book bag, and a lit cigarette in his hand. He was wearing a thrift-store tweed jacket and a bow tie. All that was missing was the teddy bear, but he was rather dashing, I had to admit—and seemed to have grown up a little. He was now twenty-six—the age I had been when I’d first met him.

  He next announced that he’d moved to New York to attend the graduate writing program at Columbia. As I stood there listening, I tried to seem cool and slightly indifferent to him and his news, but that unusual gravitational pull still existed between us. I wondered if he felt it also.

  In the three years since we’d parted, he had called and written to me periodically. It annoyed the hell out of me at first—I mean, he’d dumped me and now he wanted to be my “friend”? Well, I have enough friends, thank you very much, I’d thought. Then, as more time went by, and he kept writing, I slowly started to respond. So we had kept in touch through the mail, even as we were both moving around quite a bit. His letters to me were filled with carefully wrought details of his travels and surroundings and longing romantic insinuations; I wrote back, chatty and off the cuff, careful to keep my distance. I had heard through a mutual friend that things hadn’t worked out between him and the girlfriend he’d gone back to.

  “I actually came to ask you if you’ll have dinner with me Friday night?” he asked after a few minutes of catch-up.

  I considered turning him down, but “Um, okay” came out of my mouth instead.

  “Great!”

  We stood there on the sidewalk, looking at each other, not speaking for a few moments. It was as if we were in a play, and we’d both forgotten our
lines. I thought about the letters he’d written me, which were upstairs in my apartment in an old, frayed Tiffany’s box, bound with a white ribbon. I didn’t know what he was thinking. We said our good-byes; he went off on his bicycle and I trudged up the steps to my flat to sleep the evening away.

  We met a few days later at one of the Ethiopian restaurants popular with the African cabdrivers on Amsterdam Avenue above 121st Street. I took my sister along with me for protection. The three of us made small talk about the writing program, his travels to Southeast Asia working as a recruiter for his dad’s small Midwestern college, and living in the city. After dinner, David suggested we come back to his place around the corner for a nightcap.

  “Sure,” I said, but kicked Robin under the table, indicating that she couldn’t possibly desert me. She looked annoyed but forced a smile and nodded.

  We walked a few blocks to Butler Hall, a rather grand, old brick building on Morningside Drive, where his graduate­-student housing was. The lobby had a little tinkling fountain, Persian carpets, dark-wood paneling, and a doorman. The roof of the building even had an elegant restaurant, called La Terrace. David took us up there first to see the view from the restaurant’s outdoor patio. We could see from the lights on the George Washington Bridge to Midtown, and below, the streetlamps that lined the walkways of Morningside Park and Harlem. It was spectacular.

  When we went down to his apartment, David poured us each a bourbon and popped a Django Reinhardt cassette into his boom box. It was the same tape I’d made for him years before, with a gorgeous rendition of “September Song,” which was “our song”—or one of them, anyway. When you are so in love, every song seems to belong to you. I smiled nervously.

  My sister rolled her eyes at us and placed her glass down on the little wooden table pushed up against the wall. “You two need to get over yourselves.” She smirked as she walked out the front door.

  So David and I were alone, sipping our drinks in a semi-lit apartment overlooking the night sky, as a whoosh of pigeons circled the tops of the buildings, and the gunshots went crack every now and then in the park across the way.

  “There’s something I want to tell you,” he said.

  I thought I should sit down, whatever it was. I perched myself on a light green sofa that looked as if it had been lifted from a seventies motel lobby. “Yes?”

  “Show you, actually.” He went to his bedroom, returned with a small, thin book, and sat down next to me. “Two years ago, when I was in Asia doing recruiting for my dad’s college, I had an epiphany. I was sitting by the pool at our hotel in Hong Kong listening to this guy from Black and Decker talk about how hard it was to find a location for their new factory. He was going on and on, and the sun was glinting off the water and the skyscrapers, and suddenly, it hit me. . . .” He looked at me but was clearly seeing, reliving, the moment. “I’d made a terrible mistake letting you go. And I knew that if I ever got the chance to make it up, to do it over, I had to. So, this is it.”

  He handed me the book. The epiphany was written inside and dated from Hong Kong two years before: “. . . woke to a blinding sun and this nightmare: That I love you and that I was wrong to spend this entire year apart from you and that I will never make a worse mistake and that without you I am truly alone.”

  I was stunned into silence, didn’t know what to say.

  “When I found out you were back in the city and I was moving here, I knew it was my chance. So, I’m taking it.”

  Overwhelming, unbelievably arrogant, and romantic, his declaration was also risky. All his chips were on the table—and he was no actor.

  So I kissed him.

  We drank too much. We made love. I left in the morning feeling as if I’d been hit by a big wave—thrilling, dark, and disorienting all at once.

  • • •

  Desperate for work and still checking coats, I started going out for shows anywhere: George Bernard Shaw in Florida and Amadeus at Missouri Rep. I came close to getting the role of St. Joan at a theater in Utah, but ended up not booking it. Discouraged and depressed as I went to auditions for shows in Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Montgomery, Alabama, I wanted to run away but couldn’t find a job that would take me. I started sleeping a lot and crying too much, despite my happiness at David’s and my reunion. Elaine told me that relationships don’t make your life, they only enhance it.

  In our next session, she expressed some concern over my mental state. “Wendy, I’ve been thinking that you might benefit from medication. A predisposition toward depression runs in your family. Have you ever considered going on something that might help you function a bit better?”

  She was right. My dad had struggled with depression, my mom was certifiably crazy, and I had a cousin who’d committed suicide in his twenties. Still, taking pills seemed cowardly. I should be able to handle it all on my own, right?

  “I’m not depressed. I have a boyfriend! And I can still make jokes!” I chortled grimly.

  “Look at it this way, if you had a headache, wouldn’t you take something for the pain?”

  “I suppose so. . . .”

  “There’s a new drug on the market called Prozac. I’m going to write you a prescription. It takes about two weeks to take effect, and I’ll monitor you in case we need to adjust the dosage.”

  She scribbled on a prescription pad and handed it to me. I figured I might as well give it a shot.

  Ten days after I started the meds, I was walking down the street on my way to an understudy audition for a play on Broadway called The Heidi Chronicles that had just won the Pulitzer. I began to whistle as I felt this surge of, well . . . happiness. I felt like dancing; my anxiety about the tryout actually evaporated, and I walked into the room feeling confident and relaxed. The audition was at Playwrights Horizons, where the show had originated before moving to the Plymouth Theatre on Forty-fifth Street. I read for the playwright, Wendy Wasserstein, a giggly, zaftig woman with a bevy of dark, corkscrew-curly hair, and the head casting director of Playwrights Horizons, Daniel Swee, who resembled a small boy in grown-up clothes and wire-rimmed glasses. The job covered ten roles—I had seen the show the night before, after Didi had told me the producers would comp me. The play, about a woman’s struggle to find love and happiness without compromising her identity, resonated with me.

  After I’d finished reading, Wendy picked up my résumé off the table in front of her. She and Daniel leaned their heads together and seemed to have a little powwow, then looked up at me, smiling.

  “That was wonderful, Wendy, and of course I love your name.” Wendy laughed like a little girl, which made me laugh, too.

  “Thank you.”

  I made my way down the stairs to the street and walked along Forty-second Street. I knew I’d nailed it; I even had this weird feeling that I might actually get the job. When I got home, there was a message from Didi on my service to call her right away.

  “They loved you. They don’t even want to do a callback. They want you to start immediately!”

  We both screamed and jumped up and down like demented cheerleaders, she in her office and me in my small, dark bedroom. I was a coat-check girl no longer.

  “So, you need to go to the show every night so you can learn it. Your wig and costume fittings will be in a few days, and you’ll rehearse with the stage manager.”

  “Oh my God!”

  “And there’s one more thing. You’ll definitely go on for one of the actresses, who has to go to a wedding in January. You did it, girl! I knew you could. You are going to be on fucking Broadway!”

  “I couldn’t have done it without you. Thanks for believing in me, Didi.”

  “Sure, Gwendolyn. Let’s go out and celebrate!”

  When I met her at the bar at Café des Artistes, she’d ordered a bottle of champagne. We drank the whole thing and toasted to the future and each other and Broadway. In some ways it felt like th
e end of a long journey begun by our parents’ crazy elopement more than twenty years before. The unlikeliness of our friendship made the moment all the sweeter.

  David was thrilled for me. Like Isaac, and unlike so many of my other boyfriends, success didn’t threaten him. He had been made nonfiction editor of the Columbia literary magazine and, since they had little office space, would meet with writers or interview subjects at bars in Midtown after work and classes. Afterward he’d stop by the Plymouth and watch the second act of the show or wait for me in the greenroom. He made fast friends with Peter Mumford, the stage manager, who called him my “stage-door johnny.” If David was working late, I’d call the pay phones at the West Bank Cafe or Mulligan’s or Rudy’s to see where he was and meet him there—their numbers were scrawled on the back page of my little black address book. At Christmas, he rented a car and drove to Ohio to spend it with his family while I worked—the holidays are a busy season for Broadway and being a part of it was exhilarating.

  Robbie and I spent Christmas Day together at my apartment, eating roast chicken, drinking champagne, and watching one of our favorite movies, High Society. We were having a blast—free of the past, guilt, and expectations, we made our own fun and had one of our best Christmases yet. The phone rang and for a second I feared it was Mother, but it was David. He regaled me with stories of his visit with his Norman Rockwell–esque family, who went to midnight Mass on Christmas Eve and then came home to drink mulled wine by the fire. On Christmas Day, they’d gone ice-skating on the pond and drunk hot chocolate.

  Seriously? I thought. It’s so corny. “Call me when you get back.” I quickly hung up and went back to my sister and the movie.