It's Only Temporary: The Good News and the Bad News of Being Alive (12 page)

And it took that long, but that’s when the day achieved its theme. Because it was the same story with Patricia and the ring. It’s why I still had the ring to sell over a year after we’d split, and why the year of trying to put things back together had failed. As I’d dragged myself and my self-pity to Sotheby’s, and as I’d tried to soothe it by seeking the acceptance of those I’d traded blows with throughout and beyond my illness and recovery, I was trying to prove the impossible. That history doesn’t exist if you’d prefer it was erased. That words haven’t been spoken if you say you want them back. That love can be re-offered – and reaccepted – where it once was withdrawn.

“I’ve forgiven me. How come they won’t?”

Maybe Sloan-Kettering would be a better place if the people there were able to listen to criticism without exiling the source of it. Maybe my ex would be a better woman if she’d been able to forgive the ways I’d let her down. It’s not for me to judge, especially considering my own participation in each of those equations. For me, the question is why I feel the need for their forgiveness. Why do I have such a strong urge to say, and do, exactly what I want under every set of circumstances, then to demonstrate that those words, and actions, don’t have to have any of the consequences I don’t want them to have? The mature act would be to accept a formula, and to alter one’s behavior accordingly. It’s called growing up, in most circles.

Only a child, or a madman, would attempt, repeatedly, to alter irrevocable laws. I’ve been acting the part of an insane Isaac Newton. I sit under a tree, where an apple falls on my head. Instead of recognizing gravity, and finding a different place to sit, I spend the rest of my days taping all the remaining apples to all the trees in the orchard, trying to prevent them from ever falling again. For a hard case it requires exhaustion to set in. Or, enough bruises – not to mention apples rotting above your head – to be willing to change. From now on, instead of looking back and trying to fix what’s already happened, I’m going to carry forward the lessons I’ve learned. I’m going to try not to make the same mistakes again. Maybe someday I’ll come upon an apple that’s at eye level. I won’t have to dodge it, and I won’t feel compelled to keep it from falling. I’ll just pick the apple off the tree, and take myself a bite. If I’ve learned anything from the past at all, I’ll enjoy that apple. I’ll savor it for the taste. Then I’ll walk on by, leaving that particular tree behind.

The problem with falling in love with someone who lives 12,500 miles away is that it’s hard to arrange for dates. In case you’re not up on your geography, that’s as far away from someone as you can get without leaving the planet Earth. It’s only a fraction of the distance to the moon, but it’s about thirty-five times farther than the International Space Station, to give some perspective. Despite the frequency of airline flights, if you live in New York City, Australia is very far away. Which means someone is going to have to travel.

In New York, uncountable relationships have been ruined simply as a result of partners living in different boroughs of the same city. For those who require spontaneity in their courtship rituals or hasty retreats after mating, even thirty-minute subway rides can spell doom. To get to Sydney, Australia, from New York City doesn’t only take twenty hours of flying time on two different airplanes, it erases two days from your life due to crossing the International Date Line. Leave New York on Tuesday, arrive in Sydney on Thursday. As far as Wednesday goes, don’t plan any important meetings because for you it doesn’t exist.

Sane people (if you can call anyone dating someone who lives 12,500 miles away sane) might handle this by taking turns making brief visits. Insane people handle it by having two actors meet in Los Angeles, where neither party lives, to share an apartment for two months during Pilot Season, one of the most arcane and stressful rituals of show business.

For those not well versed in entertainment industry parlance, Pilot Season is the annual influx of actors into southern California for the three-month period when most new network television shows are cast and filmed. In many cases they are then recast and re-filmed. Most of those shows are then shelved and never shown to the public. Amid this chaos lies hidden one of the many hushed-up facts of the entertainment industry: actors, much like grape pickers, are actually migrant workers. Our union’s just a bit stronger than theirs. Or, wait. On second thought, it’s not.

I spent the first two months of this new century in Sydney, Australia, making a television movie about The Three Stooges, playing frizzy-haired Larry Fine. I’d say I spent the winter there, but in Australia January means summer. The two months down under marked the eighth and ninth months out of the past eleven I’d spent working away from home, and away from my crumbling relationship. Abbey Leigh was an actress I met during my stay, a blonde beauty brimming with all the bawdiness and snappy banter common to Australians. She was quick to smile, quick to joke, quick to poke fun at someone else, and quick to toss back a blistering retort should anyone be brave enough to poke fun at her. I was already down for the count with a crush when Abbey Leigh and I decided to spend Valentine’s Day sunning ourselves in Sydney’s botanical gardens.

It was a cold summer day in Sydney, and Abbey Leigh and I sat wrapped up under a blanket trying to stay warm. But not too warm. We spent hours that day gazing into each other’s eyes, doing our best to keep our hands to ourselves. Every so often I got up and walked a polite distance to phone Patricia, my fiancée, back in New York to wish her a happy one-year anniversary of our engagement. (Note to all affianced individuals: if the engagement lasts a year and still no date is set, there
is
trouble in paradise.) I hung up the phone, then walked the several meters back to Abbey Leigh, wondering what on Earth she could have been thinking during my absence.

Rolling around under a blanket was about as far as we took things during that stay in Sydney. Take that as my tepid nod to fidelity. I then spent the second anniversary of my marriage proposal to Patricia with Abbey Leigh as well – this time, at least, after Patricia and I had split up. Our second visit was in Los Angeles, where we’d decided to meet to “get to know each other.” The only way to accomplish this was to be on the same continent. The only way to afford that was to live together.

Does that seem extreme? If so, think about this: if ever Abbey Leigh and I had decided that we wanted to date on a more extended basis, we’d have to have gotten married. Since neither was wealthy enough to forgo employment, and since neither could legally work in the other’s country, we’d have been forced to wed in order to be in close enough proximity to date. For Abbey Leigh and I, our Los Angeles adventure seemed like a reasonable compromise. It seemed the sensible thing to do.

Nearly a year had passed since our initial meeting in Australia and I’d continued to be plagued by thoughts of her. Living out my days in New York, coming up hard on forty years old, I’d take my daily (okay, my biweekly) jog around the reservoir in Central Park and obsess furiously over what I’d been obsessing over for months already. Every step, every heaving breath, every waking moment, every tormented hour of miserable half-sleep. Should I abandon everything I’d worked hard to construct – indeed, everything I’d worked hard to convince myself was right and good – or should I go ahead and marry Patricia?

My fiancée and I had come to love each other and depend on each other, but the fact was we hadn’t been getting along. Or maybe that’s exactly what we had been doing. What we hadn’t been doing was thriving. We hadn’t, on any deep level, been connecting, and we certainly hadn’t been communicating.  Open communication was what I craved, but it wasn’t Patricia’s style. When I met a beautiful Australian woman, seemingly mature for her years, whose quest in life was to communicate as emotionally as possible, and to connect as deeply and passionately as a body could withstand, I found her irresistible.  I was thrilled to discover that her interest in me was equal to my admiration for her. What I wasn’t proud of was that I’d met her while I was already engaged. On location.  Shooting a film. Playing a Stooge.

I’d like to say that’s as predictable as it gets, but I can’t. Abbey Leigh was only
twenty-five years old. That’s not terribly original behavior for a thirty-nine-year-old man. But, I could point out, the full age difference was only in effect from January through August. Five months of the year the age difference was – numerically speaking – a mere thirteen years. Does that make it less tawdry?

I was drawn to Abbey Leigh as a result of her maturity and communication skills. This was in comparison to the woman I was with, who became paralyzed by any question more probing than “what would you like for dinner?” Then again, Patricia was a vegetarian who didn’t like beans, rice, or very many vegetables. Her favorite meal was a bagel with cream cheese, in spite of the fact she was lactose intolerant. So even questions about dinner could be provocative.

But Abbey Leigh was too young for me. She eventually said so herself, during one of our later meetings after the relationship had been consummated. She just phrased it differently. She said
I
was too old for
her
. Only she used different words.

“You’ve got the lowest-hanging, droopiest balls I’ve ever seen,” was how she put it.

Abbey Leigh was raised by her mother in Darwin, a humid port city near the equator on Australia’s North shore. I’ve never visited Darwin, but it’s been described to me as a place I wouldn’t want to go. “Hardscrabble” was the word that was used, which made me think of a preponderance of bars, and the men stumbling out of them who’d want to beat me up. She’d been conceived when her mother, traveling through Central America as part of a dance troupe, crossed paths with an American soldier she knew only as “PJ, from Sarasota.” A letter was sent via the U.S. Military in an attempt to inform “PJ, from Sarasota” of the pregnancy, but no reply was ever received. Abbey Leigh was raised never knowing her father, whose identity remains a mystery.

This cocktail of facts had imbued Abbey Leigh with a striking combination of toughness and vulnerability. She was a volatile, titillating, ambitious woman-child, and her snappy repartee and skill at putting me on the defensive all contributed toward my infatuation. The fact that she had a deep fascination with human behavior and motivation, as well as a desire to understand her own actions and those of the people she interacted with, made her seem like an antidote to the limitations of the relationship I’d most recently been living with, or running from.

I was open with Abbey Leigh about my lack of availability even as I pursued her. Our attraction for each other was immediate, quickly became huge, and – aside from the fact that we kept it from being consummated during that initial stay in Australia – dominated our dealings with each other.

“You want to give me a massage?” Abbey Leigh once asked, amid her complaints of a muscle in spasm. “People use massages to relax. What are you trying to do, kill me?”

Or, in one of her more tender moments, as we were suffering toward our inevitable separation when I’d return home to New York, Abbey Leigh simultaneously complimented and criticized me.

“You’re a gift,” she said. “You’re an Indian giver, but you’re a gift.”

Abbey Leigh was a clever girl. She also occasionally called me a coward. I never thought she was so clever then.

Shortly after Patricia and I declared one of our intermittent splits, Abbey Leigh and I made arrangements for our reunion. We’d been corresponding via email and talking on the telephone ever since I’d left Australia. At first she played the role of a good friend who understood and sympathized with the difficulties I was having. Then, as can often happen, the fact that she understood my frustrations better than my partner did made me feel closer to my confidant.

“You’re beautiful,” Abbey Leigh would tell me over the phone after I’d recounted one of my many shortcomings to her.

“I’m beautiful? What are you talking about?” I’d ask. “I just told you how selfish I am.”

“Yes, but you feel bad about it. And you want to change. And you will.”

It’s hard to turn away from that kind of loving acceptance and encouragement. I ached for contact with Abbey Leigh while things with Patricia unraveled. An hour on the phone with her could transport me into a fantasy life in which I imagined feeling completely fulfilled. I’d hang up feeling as if I was emerging from a hot bath. I couldn’t wait to see her again, this time without constraints.

The television show I’d been working on before my trip to Australia hadn’t been renewed for another season, so I was eager to make this pilot season pay off by booking another show. This can be difficult to accomplish. Without going too much into the intricacies, television shows are cast under a system whereby actors, before participating in a final audition for studio and network executives, are required to sign away the exclusive rights to their services for a period of six years before they’re even allowed to enter the room to compete for the job. This protects the television networks from ever having to bid against one another for the services of an actor. I’m not aware of any other industry in which workers are forbidden from applying to more than one employer at a time, forbidden from attending an interview without first agreeing to terms (for six years!), and are then bound to accept the job should they be chosen, all before getting to meet their prospective boss. I’m fairly certain there’s a strong argument to be made that the practice is illegal, but that’s a topic for another time.

Actors are also often not informed, prior to making those six-year commitments, in which city the television show will be filmed. That’s right, just applying for the job often requires committing to a show whose location will be determined at a future date. The decision usually depends on where the production company can get the best tax incentives. Most often this means Canada. For the actor this means…well, leaving the country.

That’s the type of offer I received while Abbey Leigh was flying over the Pacific toward Los Angeles. These deals are hammered out in the most frantic, last-minute fashion imaginable, and have to be completed before the audition begins the next day. Negotiations often last deep into the night, continuing through the next morning and up to the moment the actor walks through the door to begin reciting his lines. Abbey Leigh walked off the airplane from Australia into a hailstorm of phone calls, low-ball offers, counteroffers, and my repeated declining of salaries beyond anything she’d earned in her life.

“I might have a job,” I said to her as we walked out of the airline terminal.

“That’s fantastic,” she said.

Then, as we approached the car, which she’d have to learn to drive on the right, rather than the left, side of the road, I told her just how fantastic.

“It might shoot in Toronto.”

Silence.

“Starting in four days.”

Abbey Leigh stopped short of getting in the car.

“It would last about four weeks.”

That was half the length of our scheduled visit, for which Abbey Leigh had traveled halfway around the world. I knew it was a horrible thing to greet her with, but the four weeks of work would pay wages on which I could live for a year.

“Don’t worry, I won’t go in for it if you don’t want me to.”

Things were starting to look up professionally. But for Abbey Leigh and me it was a less than auspicious beginning.

I wasn’t chosen for the pilot. But that didn’t mean there weren’t issues of envy in the following days over the number of appointments I had compared with Abbey Leigh, or the salaries I was tentatively offered compared to what she was accustomed to getting paid at home. These are comparisons I’d had a difficult time not despairing over a few years earlier, when I’d dated an actress whose success was then surpassing my own. It is a genuinely hard dynamic to navigate. And Abbey Leigh was dealing not only with the difficult emotions of sharing a home with someone whose career chronology was more advanced than hers, but also the fact that she’d parked herself in a city – a nation – in which she was completely unknown. She’d already earned herself some respect as a film and theater actress in Australia. But Australia was…well, you know how far away it was. Abbey Leigh had given up a lot to come to Los Angeles.

Abbey Leigh wasn’t the only one experiencing jealousy. Mine ran wild when she was offered an Australian film from simply sending home a videotape she made at her LA agent’s office. It had been a long time since I’d dated an actress, and I was starting to remember why actors congratulate one another when they date someone who doesn’t work in the same industry. We tend to be less than gracious when it comes to our friend’s, or even our lover’s, successes. It’s not that we don’t wish them well. We just don’t wish them better than ourselves.