Heart of Glass Read online

  With its frilly tartan curtains, old wooden bar, and Naugahyde booths, McHale’s had a certain sad, crappy charm. You could imagine some poor bastard really crying into his beer here. It was always packed with up-and-­coming actors, stage stars, has-beens, union set and prop guys, and local drunks. The food was middling but inexpensive, and the drinks were big and cheap. Michael was sitting at a table in the back, talking to a couple of other guys—actors, I guessed.

  Before I met him at the theater in Cambridge, Michael had been in a successful Broadway play for three years, but times had been lean since then. He’d been working putting up drywall and had bought an apartment on the Upper West Side, fixing it up as an investment. His career had stalled, and he had been relying more on the construction work, which frustrated him. I approached the table and sat down, but they were busy talking shop: who was being seen for the new Arthur Miller play, how hard it was to get in to see a certain hot casting director, who was getting his or her teeth capped or a nose job, and what a prick Hal Prince was. I ordered a cheeseburger and waited for my turn to talk. I often felt, when out with Michael’s friends, that I was invisible. Everyone else talked a lot, but I was afraid to open my mouth, in case it made me look stupid, so usually I didn’t. Maybe because I was the youngest person by far at the party or the bar or the restaurant when we went out together, I lacked the courage and the confidence to join in the fray. I thought of Manhattan, a movie I’d seen in Boston the year before on a date, because I was the exact opposite of Mariel Hemingway’s character, Tracy. Although Tracy is dramatically younger than her boyfriend, played by Woody Allen, and his crowd, she is enormously self-possessed and articulate, comfortable wherever she is. I wished I could be more like her, but lacking her assuredness and brio, I preferred to be a wallflower, hoping that I wouldn’t be noticed or called upon.

  After about fifteen minutes, Michael’s actor pals patted him on the back and drifted away toward the bar. He told me how his auditions had gone and jokingly asked how Washington and Bernstein were. I filled him in about Harvey, the eviction, and my imminent homelessness. He didn’t say anything, just nodded and stirred his scotch on the rocks with a little red plastic straw. I thought about telling him about Ben, but realized just in time that he would only be needlessly jealous. So I just told him about the movie, which he said sounded like a snooze. He didn’t like David Bowie anyway.

  Afterward, we strolled down Restaurant Row toward Times Square to look at the lights and do some people watching—something most actors love to do. Jazz music drifted out from the saloon doors along the street, scrawny trees rasped their branches together, and waiters on their breaks, dressed in black pants and white shirts, smoked cigarettes on the stoops. We turned the corner and, a few blocks down, ducked into Playland, so Michael could play Space Invaders.

  The arcade was jammed with people, mostly young males, leather-clad street types with greased-back hair or disco-suited preeners in high-heeled boots with their shirts open to expose all their cheap gold chains. They were showing off to their drinking buddies or to their scantily clad, big-haired girlfriends. Pressed shoulder to shoulder hunched over the game cabinets, they jerked and flipped the buttons on the control panels, the screens throwing a ghoulish green glow over their faces. Loud beeping, buzzers, and bells all wailed simultaneously, and overhead speakers blared “Ladies’ Night” by Kool and the Gang. There were whoops of victory or fist-pumping when someone made a big score or blew the most heads off. It smelled like old fry-pit oil and BO and made me feel dirty just standing there.

  “I think you should move in with me!” Michael suddenly shouted toward me over the din, his hand smacking the firing button about a hundred times a minute as he killed electronic aliens.

  “What?!” I wasn’t sure I’d heard him correctly.

  “You should move in with me!”

  “Maybe!” I yelled back. The truth was I didn’t want to move in with him. Having just escaped my mother’s house, I wanted to be independent. But I was stuck and had less than a day to find another place to go.

  “But I don’t want you to feel like you have to ask me! I could probably crash on a couch somewhere until I figure something else out!” I had only two friends living in the city—women I’d met at BU—both of whom had transferred here. Jenny Ott was a native New Yorker who lived with her boyfriend, Pete Homer, and two roommates; and Julie was a vegetarian meatpacking heiress who was now studying painting at the School of Visual Arts.

  Michael looked up at me from the popping, crablike images moving across the screen. “I want you to move in! I love you!” he practically screamed in my face.

  “You do?!” I yelled back over the general cacophony. Suddenly I felt as if my throat were closing up. I cared about Michael, but wasn’t sure I loved him—or even what that meant.

  Michael leaned over, kissed me, and smiled. “Of course I do! Now cheer up and play some Space Invaders!” He shoved more coins into the slot.

  “I’m terrible at stuff like this!” I said apologetically. The noise in the arcade was ear piercing, and I was starting to feel claustrophobic from all the bodies and the din. I just wanted to leave. I tried to play the game, but I was awful. I couldn’t hit anything. “See?! I can’t do it!” I looked at Michael and threw up my hands.

  “Try again!”

  “Really?!” I replied weakly, trying to think of a way to end this. I could pretend to faint—or vomit maybe.

  “Wendy”—he shook his head at me, frowning slightly—“if you can’t play a video game, how do you expect to play the game of life?!”

  I couldn’t believe he was serious, and my mouth dropped open a little. “It’s just a stupid game, Michael! Can’t we go?!”

  I could tell he was irritated, but he took my hand and we left. I felt embarrassed at my clumsiness, but at the same time I wondered why he was treating me like a naughty little kid. Maybe because I was acting like one.

  We walked out onto the smelly, crowded street on our way to the subway, past the transvestites, the break-­dancers, and the Jesus freaks who wore REPENT signs—all the ­humanity lit up by the marquees of myriad porno theaters. Michael was going uptown, I was going downtown. After

  we went through the turnstile, I reached out and touched his arm.

  “I’m sorry about the game.” It seemed easier to apologize for myself and my failings at video games than to call him on his bullshit.

  “Forget it.” He gave me a peck on the cheek. “See you tomorrow. I’ll get a key made for you.” He smiled, then turned to descend to the uptown train platform. Watching him go down the steps, past a poster for Don Giovanni at the Met, I realized I hadn’t told him that I loved him back.

  The next morning I bade farewell to the frazzled Beth, whose baleful-looking parents were packing up her bedroom set, her bike, and area rugs to be shipped back to the heartland. Her experiment in Sodom was over. She’d decided to leave Parsons and find an art school closer to Cleveland.

  No one was coming to pick me up and take me home. Luckily, I didn’t have much to pack. Traveling light was my métier—a skill from a childhood spent on the move. I shoved my clothes into the now ironically named Ciao! suitcase Harvey had given me and put everything else—my clock radio, a few books, and my toothbrush—in a Lamston’s bag I’d found under the sink. I rolled up my futon and tied it with a pair of panty hose. Hoisting it all up on my shoulders, Sherpa-style, I walked down the stairs and out onto Eighth Street to hail a cab to Michael’s apartment uptown.

  Standing on the curb with my hand up in the air, I tried not to drop the futon on the filthy sidewalk. My first perch as a film student hadn’t worked out. I had come to New York to escape my mother and to find a life for myself, but now I was moving in with my boyfriend. I couldn’t help but feel that I had somehow failed, and that, like my mom, I was being saved by a man.

  chapter two

  MODERN LOVE

&n
bsp; Leaving the jungle of downtown, traveling by taxi to the Upper West Side, I might as well have been aboard a steamship on an expedition to a foreign continent. This was the land of gourmet grocery stores like Zabar’s and Fairway, yuppies, upscale watering holes and fern bars like Marvin Gardens and J.G. Melon, and enormous prewar apartment buildings: the Ansonia, the San Remo, the Beresford, with their uniformed doormen, high ceilings, and hardwood floors.

  My cabdriver stopped at the light on Seventy-second Street and Central Park West, kitty-corner from the Dakota, another majestic building that had briefly been my childhood home during Mother’s stormy second marriage to my now ex-stepfather. Lauren Bacall, Leonard Bernstein, and Rudolf Nureyev had all lived there or were living there still. Our doorman, if he hadn’t retired, might be calling a taxi for John and Yoko. I looked up at the windows of the rooms where I used to play with my sister. Now I was an outsider, riding past a place I once called home.

  Michael’s apartment was not in one of those grand buildings but in a modest, narrow one wedged behind Broadway on Eighty-fifth Street. His place was basically a large studio with a tiny separate kitchen and bathroom. On the inside of the building with a view of the air shaft, the apartment was dark during the day, which lent it an atmosphere of limbo. I found the absence of light disorienting—you never knew what time it was or what the weather was like outside. If you wanted to see the sky, you had to stick your head all the way out the window and crane your neck acrobatically toward the top of the shaft.

  Dragging my life behind me in a shopping bag and a suitcase, I paid the driver and emerged from the taxi futon-first. I trudged up the front steps, shedding a few wire hangers as I went, and pressed the button next to Michael’s name. At the flat, harsh sound of the buzzer, I pushed myself against the door and into the foyer. I took the cramped elevator up to the fourth floor and knocked on Michael’s door.

  “You’re here!” he said, opening the door, and grabbed at my largest bundle, the futon, which he stashed in a corner. A narrow hallway led to the main room of the apartment, which functioned as a bedroom/living room/dining room. “I cleared out a few drawers for you and made space in the bathroom,” he said brightly. The apartment had no closets, but he had bought a few wheeled coatracks that lined one wall.

  “Thanks.” I forced a smile as I tried not to feel like some poor relative he was taking in. I hadn’t even planned to unpack, just live out of my suitcase as if I were staying at a hotel. But I dutifully hung up my clothes and placed my stockings, underwear, and T-shirts in the drawers that were open and empty, waiting for me to arrive. The double bed was covered with a drab brown spread and hugged by a wooden, modular bed frame with built-in side tables. The room was barely illuminated by the dim track lighting that hung overhead. Everything felt, looked, very masculine. An awful cocktail of anxiety and fear began to wash over me—a mixture of the uneasiness I felt at being beholden to Michael and the realization that I was trapped in this gloomy space, expected to call it my own, too. It was as if I were giving away a piece of myself.

  “I’m sorry, there’s nothing in the fridge because I’m redoing the kitchen—but I thought we’d go out and celebrate your first night here.”

  I staved off a panicked urge to run out the front door. “Sure.” I swallowed my feeling of impending doom. “That’d be nice. Let me just pop into the loo.”

  “I love that you call it that!”

  I nodded weakly.

  The bathroom was a few steps up, near the base of the bed. I walked in and closed the door, trying to take some deep breaths to calm down. I peed and splashed some cold water on my face. Looking at my reflection in the mirror surrounded by brown tile and speckled faux marble, I wondered if I’d made a really big mistake. Maybe I should have called my girlfriend Jenny to ask if I could crash on the couch.

  Get a grip, I told myself, don’t think of it as “living together.” It’s just temporary, like I’m a houseguest, right? Then why did I feel this heavy sense of dread? Oh, well, I sighed, it was too late now. I took a deep breath, plastered on my best fake smile, and walked to the door to meet Michael.

  We went to a Peruvian Chinese place on Broadway called Flor de Mayo that was near Michael’s apartment. We ate this killer rotisserie chicken that came with black beans and fried plantains, washing it down with Tsingtaos. The beer took some of the edge off my jitters.

  “I do love you, you know.” Michael grabbed my hands across the table.

  “I know. I love you, too.” I hoped it didn’t sound like a reflexive response. I was still making up my mind about it myself but wanted to appear convincing.

  “It’s more than that, really . . . it’s like I love the woman you’re going to become.” He smiled and looked at me dreamily.

  “Um, thanks.” This struck me as a curious thing to say. Did it mean that I wasn’t a complete person, in some way? Was I watered-down, abbreviated? A Reader’s Digest ­condensed version of a woman? I knew that I wasn’t perfect, maybe even kind of a fuckup, but I thought I’d left my training wheels behind long ago.

  Michael paid the check. He’d told me he wasn’t going to make me pay rent, just my share of the phone and utilities. Even though it was generous and decent of him, I couldn’t help but feel like the oft-kept woman of my family—my mom.

  During my childhood and teen years, she had been quite adept at finding some rich guy, usually an old boyfriend she’d kept waiting in the wings, to bankroll us. A new car, a fur coat, a weekend in Paris or Fort Lauderdale—just a few of the many perks she was able to scare up with her charm and frosty-blond good looks. When she wasn’t suckering some guy out of cash, she was busy siphoning funds out of my trust account or my sister’s. The only “job” she’d had in my lifetime was writing a novel, entitled Somebody Turn Off the Wind Machine, which she’d been at work on sporadically for seven or eight years now. It was a fictionalized account of a car trip we took across America to visit her father at her childhood home in Kansas City before he died. When she wasn’t drinking massive amounts of white wine, chain-smoking, or trying to set fire to the house, she was typing her manuscript and planning how she would cope with the instant, overnight megasuccess her book—and the subsequent motion picture it would undoubtedly be made into—would bring her. She was convinced she was the next Erica Jong. I remained skeptical.

  “Ready?” Michael looked at me adoringly across the table after the waiter had brought the change from the bill.

  “Sure.” I stood up and put on my coat. We went out onto Broadway, and Michael put his arm around me. I wondered if he would want to make love when we got back to the apartment. I tensed up, as our sex life had recently reached a roadblock, a development that I felt both responsible for and guilty about. I had had little experience with men, and Michael was older and certainly more knowledgeable than my two previous boyfriends—he had given me my first orgasm. But I still found it difficult to relax and sometimes struggled to climax. I could give one to myself, but it started to bother Michael that he couldn’t always. I assured him that it was fine, that I enjoyed being held and touched, and that I didn’t always have to “get off,” but he would get annoyed and say things like “What’s the point of having sex if I can’t make you come?” I didn’t know how to respond to this, except to apologize for my shortcomings, and reiterate that an orgasm wasn’t always necessary to me. This way, it was all my fault, right? But his frustration had grown as our relationship moved out of the initial first-kiss crush stage, into the more everyday-life-of-a-couple kind. I’d even faked it a few times, thinking it would make him happy.

  This time, instead of faking it, I decided to face the problem head-on . . . and lie to avoid having sex with him. “I’m super tired; I have a French test in the morning. Is it okay if I just do a little studying and go to bed?” It was my version of “Not tonight, Joséphine.”

  And it worked.

  “Sure. I spent all day putting
up drywall, so I’m beat.” Michael was currently working on a crew, doing a renovation at a young, up-and-coming actress’s place. She had made a few movies and was about to open in a play off-Broadway, a fact that pained him.

  Back at the apartment, we retreated to our corners. Michael retired to the bed to watch the news, and I sat in the tiny kitchen at the Formica table, pretending to memorize irregular verbs.

  • • •

  I sat in the dark and sniffled, wiping my eyes as I watched Giulietta Masina in La Strada, playing Gelsomina—a ­simpleminded wastrel with a huge, round face, strawlike short hair, and black, pooling eyes. She loves this brute of a man, Zampanò, but he cannot bring himself to be even a little kind to her. The girl on the screen could have been me, I so identified with her search for love and her yearning for a place to belong. She always hoped and never gave up. Of course, she dies at the end of the movie of basically a broken heart, but it still felt romantic.

  The lights came on, and we started filing out of the auditorium. I’d been at NYU a month but hadn’t made any friends in any of my classes yet. I watched kids shuffle down the steps, lighting their cigarettes and talking excitedly about the film, not sure how to join them. I envied their confidence and surety about what they were doing here, especially considering I couldn’t even bring myself to raise my hand to ask a question or venture an opinion. I felt an emotional relationship with films; my classmates seemed to know all the facts. I usually slunk out after the lights came up, more in touch with fiction than reality.

  I came home that evening to find Michael, with plaster dust in his hair, standing on a ladder painting the kitchen. The kitchen wasn’t up and running yet, so we’d been eating takeout a lot—mostly Chinese and Indian food, with the occasional burger and fries from the coffee shop on Seventy-ninth Street for variety. Eating out of paper bags and cartons only added to my sense of being in limbo, as if my life were free-floating and I had nowhere to land. It reminded me too much of my childhood, living in hotels and scrounging the last Entenmann’s doughnut from the box in the minifridge or leftover hors d’oeuvres from Mother’s cocktail parties.