Show Them a Good Time

by Nicole Flattery

  Lucy sits staring at her hands. ‘Okay.’

  ‘You can go now, Lucy.’

  Lucy stands up to leave. She wanders, dazed, stage left.

  ‘That’s not the exit,’ Natasha says, ‘that’s the exit.’ She points the other way.

  ‘Right,’ Lucy says but stands still.

  A set moves in on wheels. It’s painted like a waiting room. In its confined space are two nailed-down chairs, a table with some magazines and a clock with its hands spinning frantically: day to night, day to night. In the corner is a large potted plant. Lucy and Natasha sit on the chairs. Natasha smoothly removes her grey wig and waistcoat, shaking out her hair. Elevator music blasts out – dull, non-distinct sounds.

  ‘We’re not allowed make a single joke here,’ Natasha says.

  ‘But—’ Lucy says.

  ‘No.’

  ‘What if I—’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What do we then?’

  ‘We wait,’ Natasha says.

  The girls sit in silence, leafing through their magazines, occasionally sighing, glancing at the distorted clock, examining their fingernails.

  ‘I’m finished,’ Natasha says, after five minutes. ‘Goodbye.’ She retrieves a massive suitcase from under the table. Natasha casually picks up the plant and starts bashing the suitcase with it. Lucy doesn’t blink or move. She keeps flicking through the magazine, pausing on certain pages of interest. Natasha pounds the suitcase furiously, breathing loudly in and out with exertion. Lucy stands up and puts down her magazine. She stretches and walks off. Natasha wheels the set off. Natasha comes back in and removes the table. She pulls up the screen. For the first time, the stage is completely bare.

  Lucy enters. She is dancing sloppily. She is back in her nylon bikini and is barefoot. ‘I’m on holidays,’ she announces to the audience. A fake sun is lowered from the ceiling, a happy face drawn on it. Lucy touches it gently. A phone is lowered from the ceiling, moving down inch by inch. Lucy pulls on the receiver.

  ‘Stay on the line. Stay on the line,’ she says, ‘I’m not going to say anything mean.’ She pauses, as if gathering herself. ‘I just want to tell you that it’s not just one thing. I nearly became a person who thought that way, but it’s not. Many people don’t know that and you’re one of them.’

  Lucy watches as the receiver is raised back up. She stands there for a moment before Natasha slides onstage in a similar bikini. She takes Lucy’s hand.

  ‘What would you like to do?’ she asks. ‘We can do anything you like.’

  ‘Something dumb,’ Lucy says.

  The lights go down, completely black, and when they lift back up, Lucy and Natasha are sitting in a glass box. Lucy is retching into a bucket. Natasha sits on the floor beside her, holding her hair back. Lucy’s phone rings and she lifts her head briefly to say, ‘Tell him to fuck off, would you?’ She continues throwing up.

  Natasha takes the phone from Lucy’s hand. She looks at it. She hesitates. She looks at it again. It continues to ring. ‘Fuck off,’ she says, quite kindly, into the receiver.

  Lucy lifts her head up fully. ‘I didn’t think you would actually do that.’

  ‘I’m getting brave,’ Natasha says.

  Lucy laughs. She rests her head on Natasha’s shoulder. She closes her eyes. Natasha lifts the slab of glass from above their heads, and stars fill the glass box until it becomes a shimmering box of light. They stay inside for a few minutes before Natasha steps out and pulls the box offstage with Lucy remaining inside.

  Natasha comes back out with the small table under her arm. She spreads out the tablecloth again. She retrieves two chairs and sets them down. She runs back and gets two cups and an afternoon tea set. She considers the table for a minute, before she sits down.

  Lucy enters with a flourish. She is wearing a fur coat.

  ‘Natasha,’ Lucy says. ‘It’s me, your mother. I’ve been away but I’m back now. We can do anything you like. What would you like to do?’

  Natasha gestures at the table. ‘Just have lunch,’ she says.

  Lucy joins her and they clink teacups. They eat little pieces of cake from the set. Their conversation can’t be heard by the audience.

  As Lucy and Natasha talk, congratulating themselves in low voices, but saying goodbye too, the stage boy moves quietly around them. He is setting up a living-room space. The decor is drab, the wallpaper is ugly and old-fashioned, the lighting is low. He drags on a brown, battered couch and places a television with an aerial in the middle of the room. Lucy and Natasha move into the living-room space. They settle themselves onto the couch. Their faces glow in the blue of the television. Natasha pulls a string and ‘Abortion, A Love Story,’ spelt out in big letters falls over the scene. They sit and watch the television for a few minutes, both of them laughing.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ Lucy says. ‘I’m not sure. I don’t know if I get it.’

  The light eventually fades on both girls.

  Silence.

  Blackout.

  Curtain falls.

  Track

  My boyfriend, the comedian, took pleasure in telling me about rejection – how it came about, how to cope with in a dignified way, how it had dangerous, possibly cancerous elements. He claimed the link between cancer and repeated failure was irrefutable. He had a lot of unusual ideas. ‘Feel that,’ he said, grasping at my hips and thighs, ‘that’s the texture of rejection right there.’

  My boyfriend was famous and I wasn’t. When I walked down our tree-lined street in the city, I came back with styrofoam cups of coffee, croissants, souvenirs I considered mailing back to friends. When he walked down the street he returned aggrieved and frustrated by how much people adored him. He sent me out a lot. ‘Get my coffee extra-hot,’ he told me, like I was an assistant. ‘I want it so hot it feels like hell,’ I instructed the barista.

  I loved my boyfriend. Our back and forth reminded me of black-and-white films I hadn’t seen. Physically, we were unmatched. On forms, we were in different age brackets: he ticked one box, I ticked another. But we weren’t the sort of people who filled out forms. He could get worked up about stuff he read on the internet and I knew how to make him happy.

  ‘Here,’ I said, handing him a snow globe containing a miniature Empire State Building, ‘this is for you.’

  ‘You’re very sweet,’ he told me. I guess it was true – I could be sweet. I was Irish. I didn’t want to rely on it too heavily, do that whole bit, degrade myself. When my mother finalised the divorce from my father all she said was, ‘Never give people what they want.’ It was such good advice.

  At the party, where I first met him, I explained that I wasn’t a famous person and I had zero intention of becoming one. I wanted to make him laugh. I liked him. That didn’t happen to me every day. ‘Really,’ I said, ‘I nurse quiet neurotic suspicions that even the people who know me don’t want to know me. That’s the opposite of being famous.’

  A week later, he moved me in. That first night, after I unpacked, I watched a topless man in the building opposite throw shirts out of his window. They were well-made, had seen fine interiors. I could tell by the way they flew. A rich, stiff quality that sailed nicely. The shirts fluttered, then fell, and slashes of green and pink stunned the sky. The man smiled directly at me as they hit the ground.

  *

  During our first few weeks together, he encouraged me to act. I looked like something audiences might want. I didn’t have a problem with the parts, but it was the rooms I had to go into to get the parts. It was the places I had to stand to get the parts. Before I walked in, I told myself, ‘Get it right, get it right,’ and then I froze.

  Appraising women wasn’t done anymore so it was all performed through a slippery new language I couldn’t bear. Although I lacked presence, the directors appreciated the completely vacant thing I had going on. They said I was like a person vacuum-packed, sucked in tight, motionless. My boyfriend compared me to a painting of a glowing, alien foetus he had once seen – powerf
ul but unborn. Same kind of look. Work that, he suggested. Own it. I nodded like I understood and I stopped auditioning.

  Apart from acting I had my occasional job which was layering make-up on collapsing faces. I’d been improving faces for years, presenting my own as aspiration. I turned up to houses wielding my toolkit, scraped off undesirable features and pencilled in better ones. These women gave me advice for the city—find people you can trust, guard your skin against pollution, look both ways when you cross the street. But I didn’t work much. I didn’t have to. The comedian gifted me a roll of cash and I strolled around pretending I was invested in life’s little things. It was summer and I sat in Broadway shows for the air conditioning, supped Diet Cokes and watched stage children slam doors, throw cute temper tantrums.

  I ate bad food, food that wasn’t immediately decipherable as food. You had to look at it for a while. I examined elderly women’s ankles – puffy, tracked by large blue veins – on the subway. I looked forward to having ankles like this. It would make me sturdy and sturdiness was a state I always struggled to attain.

  I knew if I spoke on the phone to my mother she would ask how I was doing and I would lie easily. In Ireland, my early twenties hadn’t been kind to me and I’d had what I generously termed a ‘restless period’. I’d started thinking it might be best if I was out of the way – but I wasn’t sure what exactly I was standing in front of. There had been a grave and embarrassing incident involving an ambulance, my mother at my hospital bedside, tear-stained and suddenly worn, with an expression that just said, ‘Don’t dare put me through this again.’

  At the recovery sessions, where I feigned boredom, the other depressives weren’t friendly, as if they didn’t quite take me seriously, implying that I hadn’t, for reasons possibly to do with youth and make-up, earned my place there. Honestly, it felt as though I had shown up at a party to which I wasn’t strictly invited. When I was no longer considered a risk to myself, I left. A nervous flier, I took pills on the plane. For three months, I slept on mattresses in trembling apartments, swayed by the subway. Then I met the comedian and my life became one impossibly smooth flight.

  I liked our evenings together. I did small, bouncy things around the apartment, swept and wiped surfaces. I had nowhere else to be, no friends to visit, no family in the city. I took long, misty showers. I had full girlfriend privileges and a choice of soft, colourful towels. He told me he loved my face, the way it nodded and reassured. He didn’t ask many questions about my life. He had strange, poverty-stricken ideas about Ireland, which he had caught from a regretful documentary, and referred to it only as ‘that place’.

  At night, he spent a lot of time on the phone speaking about his television show in low, nervous tones. He was older now, not as original or celebrated, and under his skin his organs seemed to swell outwards from stress. He was sort of a mild joke, but I was the one sleeping with him so I guess the joke was on me. Still, what’s there to say about that early time? Nothing much. We watched television in bed, mooched around the apartment, lived in our own mess. They were some of the happiest months of my whole life.

  *

  But we started going out. That’s where we went wrong. Once summer ended, we got dressed up and went out. That first night, before it all became usual, we went somewhere monstrous and glassy, a carpet rolled out like a plush red tongue. Atmospherically, this restaurant was not unlike a morgue in its coldness and we sat solemnly at a round table as if preparing for a seance. My boyfriend was seated far away from me, almost on a different continent, and he glanced over occasionally to see if I was still upright. He loves me, I thought. I examined the cutlery, my reflection in the cutlery, everyone’s reflection in the cutlery. They were so easy to agree with, these well-dressed people! I had a thrilling, weightless feeling as if I had taken several painkillers. I remembered that I had taken several painkillers. I understood everything.

  A woman appeared to me through a fog. ‘So what was it like growing up where you came from?’ she asked. ‘Was it hard?’

  I had no idea. All my memories were flat-green, postcard shaped. My parents, after their less than tender separation, became cartoon parents – fingers wagging into the frame of my life. When I told my friends I was leaving, they said it would be amazing. New York. So amazing. My hometown was a strange place dressed up as a normal place; it was as if we all lived under a sheet of suffocating plastic. I remembered my fingers trailing rental Debs dresses, the rubberiness of the dry-clean casing.

  ‘Not many opportunities,’ I said, ‘for growth.’

  The woman shook her head as if expressing incommunicable pain on my behalf. I smiled. I knew that smile would be the high-peak of my enthusiasm for the evening and I would awake in the morning, not as nicely drugged, with a new hate in my heart.

  That rain-soaked night was the first time we listened to the track. When we returned to the apartment, he produced it as if he was doing me a favour. The track – its black tentacles coiling around two circular empty eye-sockets, trapped forever in a seventies style playback box – was his lucky talisman. A childhood gift from his mother, it was how he learned to hone his routine in the basement of his suburban home, pantomiming for an imaginary audience.

  His mother was sick and growing up there hadn’t been much joy in his house. He pressed play and manic laughter burst from the lips of the ancient tape. ‘My mother was mentally ill,’ he repeated as though he was strangely proud of it, as if it legitimised him. I could have tossed out some scraped-together psychology about his present situation, but what would it have been worth?

  I imagined the comedian as a child, pirouetting desperately through his act, loosening an imaginary adult tie, preparing for a lifetime of being loved. A twelve-year-old channelling his frantic and obsessive energy in the basement, as the laughter drowned out the sounds from the other world directly above him. When I pictured his parents, I just saw them in regulation smocks, tilling the land, unsmiling.

  He promised me I was the first woman he had shown the track to. He had dated lots of girls during his time in New York – some famous, some not, asymmetrical haircuts, cool and indifferent as if it were a career requirement. He liked to make mean, primitive remarks about his exes. It didn’t bother me hugely. Types. The way he said types. I knew that a relationship could fall apart in the utterance of a single word, but this was not our word.

  I didn’t blame him. I was out there, stumbling around too. I was part of the show. Yet, that first night, when he dropped to his knees and thanked the track for his good fortune and success, I was oddly thrilled. He was a very neat person, tidy and composed, so this display of weakness was rare. As he paced through the bedroom – energetically rubbing his face, the laughter rising and falling, water leaking onto his cheeks like a reflex – I made encouraging sounds. I massaged his back, clockwise and anti-clockwise, watched him like an interested viewer. Afterwards, calmed by the noise, he felt moved to explain the different forms of comedy to me, working energetically through its history. At that moment, I have to say this – my chest grew extraordinarily tight and I felt it was very likely that I was going to die.

  *

  Over the next few months, the pattern continued – we lay in bed until evening, watched old comedies, listened to the track, had lazy sex. Then we got dressed up and went out. At the wide, marble dinner tables I was some combination of waitress and adoptee from a vague Third World country. I couldn’t comprehend the performance that was required from me by him and his friends, most of whom were on television or hovering near it.

  There was an older man at these tables, a man my boyfriend often referred to as his best friend, who was as wordless as I was. I happily misinterpreted his glances in my direction as solidarity. I was probably a bit high, finding meaning in nothing. My boyfriend often cracked jokes at this man’s expense – about his comparative lack of success, his poor real-estate investments – and he remained motionless, his expression expired, taking it easily. I sat completely stationar
y as if that alone would help me evade humiliation. The man sometimes raised his glass towards mine in mute toast.

  One afternoon, the comedian sent me out to the hairdressers before dinner. The salon was full of tanned women who picked over my scalp and commented on my blessed position. They gifted me a glass of champagne and I blew childish ripples in the surface. I left in the middle of the hair operation. I looked at my half-do in the mirror and said, ‘Wow! That looks great. Thank you, thank you so much,’ and I walked out. I expected security or someone like security to stop me at the door, but they didn’t.

  I spent the rest of the day wandering up and down the shaded, immaculate street my boyfriend and I called home. I wanted to make a discovery so I could feel like I lived there. At one end, near the subway station, was a psychic’s office. She sat in a sturdy, high-backed chair and, apart from draping a red velvet curtain across the room to separate her office from her living quarters, did nothing to make herself look mystical. That’s brazen, I thought as I passed. Only someone gifted would do so little to announce themselves.

  That night, at dinner, nobody criticised my unusual hairstyle. It must have been decided it couldn’t be an accident because nothing about the comedian was accidental. They gazed deep into my eyes and told me I looked great. When we returned from our excursion the comedian and I fucked coldly, like we were two expensive, shiny products, as if I was something sleek he could press that would produce the correct answers.