I let Highland Park disappear behind me. That town held nothing, not the smallest clue that there once had been a girl somewhere in that house pregnant with me, feeding me her thoughts, feeding me her fears, staying maybe with the last nameless family or maybe with the family before that; no one can remember.
My mission in Highland Park had been unsuccessful, but I had figured out something, at least. The air there weighed a million pounds, but riding the train out of town I felt so light. I recognized time’s shifting weight—the heaviness of the past, the lightness of the moment.
What I was looking for wasn’t in Highland Park, wasn’t in any one place. Sometimes all you need is a Joni Mitchell song to know who you are. Sometimes you find it by accident on a foreign balcony at dawn. And sometimes your story looks like the purple spine of a snake spiraling outward across your belly, etched forever under your skin.
chapter 24
A
snake tattoo is preferable to a live snake. I drank an espresso and stared into the cage of my vicious Burmese python, Varla. Only our extremely strange cleaning woman, Shakti, potentially part reptile herself, could handle Varla without elbow-length gloves. I had wanted a pet and anything cute with fur was forbidden in our apartment, so I had walked into a Lower East Side pet store one day and walked out with Varla. I had always liked snakes and thought it would be fun to have one. I was wrong.
I hadn’t realized how traumatic it was going to be to feed the snake live mice. Even more traumatic was when I sought advice for dealing with Varla’s bad temper and the man at the pet store told me to stun the mice first. He said it would help her lose her lunging instinct. I was mortified. I was the little girl who, inspired by the Met’s Temple of Dendur, had buried my hamster in a shoebox painted to look like a pharaoh’s sarcophagus, had wept for weeks over his garden grave. But I had bought the snake and she was my responsibility. I put the girl who had lovingly constructed Habitrail castles behind me.
After that, every time Varla needed to eat, I would cry and put a mouse in a paper bag. Then I would profusely apologize to the mouse as I smashed the bag against the wall. I would drop the mouse into the terrarium and it would twitch while Varla ignored it for hours before eating it and I drowned in guilt. It was gruesome.
Andy refused to feed her.
“You wanted her, you feed her.”
It was the couch debacle multiplied by a thousand. Varla was every bad decision I’d ever made coiled tightly and hissing out at me from a smelly cage. That morning, I was contemplating how the fuck I was going to move that huge terrarium and whom I could get to adopt a mean snake, when the phone rang.
It was legendary downtown theater director Richard Foreman calling to tell me that I had been cast in his upcoming play,
Samuel’s Major Problems.
When I hung up the phone, I screamed and danced around like a housewife who had just gotten a visit from Ed McMahon.
I wanted to call Andy and tell him, but his assistant screened me out. I decided to walk over to his studio and tell him in person. He could tell his assistant to hold his calls, but he couldn’t exactly turn his girlfriend away at the door. Living with a workaholic, even one who paid the bills, wasn’t all I had hoped it would be. I picked up my script at Richard’s Wooster Street loft on my way to tell Andy the news.
I starred in the show with Steven Ratazzi and Thomas Jay Ryan, both fabulously gifted actors. I played Maria Helena, sort of a ghost/devil/succubus/nurse/Marilyn Monroe figure. My time in New York didn’t get any better than walking from my Mott Street apartment to St. Mark’s Church for the first day of rehearsals.
It was the beginning of December and my body buzzed with warmth under my overcoat, my nose frozen at the tip from the wind cutting a swath down Second Avenue. “On the Street Where You Live” played in my head—
I have often walked down this street before, but the pavement always stayed beneath my feet before—
my dorky musical-theater background impinging on my rebirth into the avant-garde. I entered the wrought-iron gates and cut past the dilapidated front doors and along the paving stones of the church, through the graveyard and back to the theater.
Richard stages plays that aren’t plays, exactly. They’re more like three-dimensional poems or philosophical treatises told as a nursery rhyme. Being cast in one of his shows means that you’ll be standing in for any number of the shadowy figures in his subconscious and that essentially you’ll be moving around inside his head for a few months. This was alternately sublime and maddening.
Richard was a nebbish, genius sweetheart and he was also a maniacal, condescending tyrant. He completely changed the set around every few days, adding obstacles, such as three waist-high black poles that blended into the rest of the scenery and caused painful accidents. During one lunch break he took away all our props and added a Plexiglas wall between the actors and the audience. During another he added body microphones and directed that all the dialogue be delivered in a whisper. During yet another he added all the props back in and changed the shape of the stage.
It was a blast. Every person on the crew was fascinating and we all tended to get drunk and make out with each other at parties. We had a costume designer named Lindsay Davis, a leather queen with an infectious laugh and a closet full of sharp little hats. Lindsay and I fast discovered that we were soul mates. I went to his loft on Thirty-eighth Street for fittings and wound up staying the whole afternoon, smoking pot and then going for pancakes at the diner downstairs. He made me a beautiful black dress that looked like a perfect 1950s cocktail number except it was completely see-through.
On my legs, Richard instructed me to put stripes of black electrical tape that were visible through the sheer fabric. They echoed a diagonal of stripes on the stage, which looked like a very narrow crosswalk. The electrical tape, reapplied each night, left red welts on my legs that didn’t go away for the whole run of the show. I felt proud of them; they were my battle scars.
We rehearsed for the month of December and the play ran for the first three months of 1993. I took a handful of hundreds out of my safe-deposit box and bought a dress to wear to dinner after opening night. It was made of burgundy crushed velvet, with a cluster of silk roses at the small of the back. True, I had a closet full of fancy dresses I never wore, but I wanted something bought by my own dollars at a store I had wandered into off a SoHo street, not a dress purchased in a frenzy by a royal guard with a sackful of Monopoly money. I wanted a dress to celebrate nothing less than a dream come true, because that’s what it was, the whole thing, from the grind of the rehearsals to the nauseating anxiety of opening night.
My parents, supportive to a fault, drove into the city and watched me perform at least once a week. Even near the end of the three-month run, my father still insisted he had no idea what the show meant and my mother still insisted on bringing the crew loaves of banana bread and trays of rugelach. My father enjoyed harassing whomever was in the seat next to him (it would inevitably be Wallace Shawn or John Malkovich or someone), demanding that the startled soul explain to him what the hell was going on up there. I might have been able to explain it, but he never asked me. I think my father much preferred frightening the glitterati.
There was a windfall of perks that came with acting in
Samuel’s Major Problems.
We got great reviews in
The New York Times
and
The Village Voice.
Before the run was over, I already had calls for other auditions. I had a lunch date with Don DeLillo the day after he came to see the show (during which I acted like a complete dipshit, but really, sue me, I was struck dumb).
Andy came on opening night and I believe he was proud of me. On one or two other nights, he left work and snuck in after the show had started. On some nights he’d come out after the show and drink with the cast and crew at Mona’s or 7A. He was a hard-drinking Texan and he could stay lucid and charming while everyone else got plastered. Everyone adored him and no one could understand it when we broke up. It was a weird thing how it happened. Andy and I never even talked about breaking up before the day I left.
The idea of Andy, the life I had imagined for us, had disintegrated before Mark showed up. But before Mark, I didn’t see it was gone. I didn’t notice. I was busy. It was a full-time job just being me, trying to stamp myself onto the face of New York, as if the heels of my shoes held a red-hot branding iron.
One night when the theater was dark, Andy asked me to come with him to meet an old Texas friend of his for drinks at Mona’s. This friend of his was visiting town from Los Angeles. He was an art director who was having a hard time holding a job in film because of his cocaine problem. I didn’t connect the dots until after two drinks. This Texas friend was the older man with whom Andy had had a “relationship” when Andy was twelve years old, a two-year relationship that had ended with an arrest in the back of a station wagon. I knew that Andy still talked to the guy, but I never expected to find myself sitting across a table from him.
They prey on the sensitive ones, the smart ones, the lonely ones. Before I left for camp the summer I would turn thirteen, I saw the movie
Marjorie Morningstar
and I figured that I was just like Natalie Wood. I was that fresh and daring inside. And I would rewrite the ending. I would never wind up a mediocre, lost housewife on a porch.
I favored white Keds and headbands. In the first week of camp I bleached orangey highlights into my hair with Sun-In and I tanned my skin with baby oil. I imagined I looked like a girl on the beach in
Blue Hawaii
, except I didn’t need a bra. Though I did steal a pink disposable razor from Erica’s shower caddy to shave off my leg hair for the first time.
Nathan was the archery guy. Everybody liked him when they didn’t kind of hate him because he was much too glamorous for that run-down camp. He was twenty-one and from New York City and rumor had it that he was a model for United Colors of Benetton. You could just picture him in one of those ads, slouched against some global-y model with an Afro and a striped scarf. Nathan had bleached blond hair that he wore parted and hanging over one eye. His khaki shorts were slung so low that you could see the waistband of his boxers. He gave me stomachaches and asthma attacks. He was more handsome than John Travolta in
Grease
and sometimes
Welcome Back, Kotter.
Cooler, even, than Elvis in
Jailhouse Rock
and
Viva Las Vegas.
The archery range was located down a grassy slope near the girls’ side of camp, between the nature hut and the pottery shack. Free play was the time before dinner when we could pretty much run wild and do whatever we wanted. I decided I wanted more than anything to learn how to shoot an arrow. But I never picked up a bow. Instead I hung out by the archery range, sitting on the nearby hill with my knees tucked under my chin.
One evening, I noted that it was too chilly for Nathan to be wearing just his T-shirt, so I ran back to my bunk and got him an oversize fuzzy pink Benetton sweater with a big white
B
on the front of it. When he put it on, I knew that it meant we had a secret, but I wasn’t sure yet what it was.
I sat quietly and watched him shoot, too far away to really talk. He was all height and angles, perfect stance, casual and confident, with the arrow placed neatly in the bow, pulled back taut.
Sometimes we girls snuck across camp to raid the boys’ side in the middle of the night. The counselors normally pretended to sleep through the nighttime shaving-cream shenanigans and panty raids. The night after I gave Nathan my sweater, I put my small travel alarm, set for three a.m., under my pillow. I kept gum by my bedside and slept carefully on my hair. But that night was different than usual, because I wasn’t waking any of my friends. I was embarking on a solo mission.
I traveled across the familiar path with tense steps, the darkness outside the beam of my flashlight dancing with disorienting shadows, saturated by the characters from every camp ghost story I had ever dismissed with a snort. I was madly inspired and frightened. The adrenaline emboldened me. It sailed me across the camp until finally the wet rubber of my sneakers tapped up the green steps to his door, which creaked as I opened it. I walked through the rows of sleeping boys in their army cots, sucking on my spearmint gum, wondering if I should swallow it. Saliva traveled down my throat like cold acid. I shook. Nathan made me ill. He had poisoned me.
I touched his shoulder blade to wake him and it was bare and sharp. When he sat up, he was a full head taller than I. I had never been that close to him before. I could barely make out his expression in the dark, but he didn’t seem surprised. He put out his hand in front of him and whispered to me, “Give me your gum.”
And when he kissed me, I thought, Tongues are like velvet shellfish. And men are easier than I ever thought. I was surprised that I had gotten what I wanted. I had gotten him to break the rules. I thought it was quite a coup. And if I often wished that I had never gotten involved with Nathan, if I felt hopelessly and immediately in over my head even though our early morning make-out sessions never really went very far, I didn’t admit it. Not even to myself, most of the time.
Later, when Nathan got fired and I was humiliated, my father had said, “What did you think was going to happen? That’s what you get for always breaking the rules.”
I drank too much that night. I was short-tempered and sarcastic and finally had to excuse myself. I walked home alone and passed out.
Later that night, Andy came back and sat on the edge of the bed. I squinted at his silhouette in the blue darkness and hazily came to the realization that the person who was stroking my calf, more like petting it, wasn’t Andy.