Page 109 of Playworld
Miss West was seated with her back to the radio. Her face was so white it looked powdered with talc. Her hands lay on her lap and she held one in the other but would not look down at them. She sat frozen, and then we saw what had happened. She had somehow stabbed the letter opener into her palm, and the tip of the dull blade was all the way through to the other side. Blood was issuing from it, slowly, thickly, just beginning to bloom on her skirt. “I was trying,” she explained, “to remove the panel screw,” and then her eyes darted from me to Amanda, “and then the blade slipped.” With a twitchy smile, she added, “I don’t want to faint.” Amanda, who had covered her mouth, now rushed toward her mother and touched her mother’s shoulder, awaiting instruction, since Miss West was a nurse and the authority in such a matter, in spite of the fact that she was the one needing help. With a courteousness incongruent with the moment, Miss West said to Amanda, “If you would get me a towel, please.” Sweat beaded her forehead, and the skin at her neck was slick. Amanda hurried to the bathroom and returned. “Just put it underneath,” Miss West said, “but gently,” and raised her hand, “where the tip is,” which hooked her soaked skirt when she lifted it from her lap. “Don’t push it out,” Miss West advised. “In case…if I severed an artery.” Amanda asked if she should call 911. Miss West shook her head. “We’re going to walk to Mount Sinai right now. Griffin…” And she waved me over with her uninjured hand, indicating that I should help her to stand.
Out of the apartment, into the elevator, onto the street—the two of us supporting her—Miss West held her injured hand out before her with the towel beneath it. Her other hand delicately supported the bunched fabric as if it were a ringbearer’s pillow. Amanda and I huddled to her with our hands cupped beneath hers. “Keep it elevated,” Miss West said, “above my heart.” The hospital came into view as soon as we turned on Amsterdam. Shuffling as we were, the walk seemed to take forever. Amanda kept saying, “You’ve got this, you can do it, not too much farther”; I kept saying, “Keep going, don’t give up, you’re doing great.” Miss West kept repeating, “I’ve got this, I can do it, doing great.” But once we arrived at the emergency room, once we stepped under the ambulancebay’s light, Miss West lost her composure. She spotted a nurse she knew and called out, “Dolores!” in a voice hoarse with terror. The woman came running over to us and said, “Patty, my God.” All the people seated in the waiting room looked up, and Miss West turned to me. When she spoke, her tone was distant and professional, so at odds with the escalating emotion I couldn’t help but take note. “I appreciate your help, Griffin, Dolores can take it from here,” and Amanda, who was crying, nodded at me and then wiped her nose so that it smeared her mother’s blood on her nostrils and across her mouth. Dolores took my place by Miss West’s elbow. And the three of them walked into the building and through another set of double doors, which, along with my chances, swallowed them whole.
Union Buster
In the year that I returned home from college and began seeing Elliott again—the year that I began to open up to him in ways I was incapable of as a boy—he said to me that we process all trauma like the oyster. We pearl the dangerous particle, if we are lucky, into something precious, into the gift. He never explained what that gift was, or what happened if we are less than lucky, because he and I ran out of time. Only in our final sessions before he died would I return to the site of my selfhood’s inception—not to the fire, to the panicked flight of our family from our burning home, but to the moment, as Dad walked me down the hallway from Al and Neal’s apartment to our incinerated one, when I felt the instant that millimeter opened between my inner terror and impassivity. And once we identified that moment, Elliott and I began to inventory certain scenes in which I’d failed to feel anything: I spying Naomi’s upturned face, her absorbed expression, when we first kissed in her car. Me lying atop Kepplemen, on his bed, his head locked in my arms, his foot trying to hook mine, our feet pointed toward his headboard; him kicking the pillows clear, me staring at the cover of the magazine, of the picture of the two wrestlers, until Kepplemen and I finally lay still. Only decades after these last sessions with my therapist would I fullycomprehend what Kepplemen had done to me—and to my friends and teammates; only in middle age would I identify the source of the fury I felt when, deep beneath my school, I’d clasp that man and make himfeelit—would make him pay for his pleasure with pain. Here, nearer to where the subways rumbled, to the network of pipelines into which the city’s catch basins fed, I was taught the indelible lesson that, to arrive at love, I must sufferthroughsomeone else’s idea of it. And yet even now, I resist the notion that we are reducible to our wounds.
But that night, after leaving Amanda and her mother at the hospital, I remained my ciphered self. I walked to Broadway and caught the bus home in something close to shock. I recall, as I deposited change in the fare box, the driver eyeing my blood-blackened hands with a wariness verging on alarm. Other than a couple of passengers sitting near the front—who, to also ignore the threat I might pose, studied our southbound progress—the bus was nearly empty. At that hour, the streets were mostly empty too. In something close to a daze, I took a seat in the back, watching the avenue unspool against the windows. I recall how voided I was, how stunned and emptied—sometimes it seemed I struggled to feel anything at all.
By the time I got back to our apartment, it was very late. I went straight to the kitchen and washed my hands with dish soap, then scraped the blood from beneath my fingernails with a paring knife. I turned off the TV in my parents’ bedroom; Mom was asleep while the national anthem played over the image of the flag. As I undressed in my own room, I noted that Oren was gone again, his bunk so neatly made it appeared as if it hadn’t been slept in all summer. I stared at the ceiling’s blank screen, replaying those same lambent images: Amanda’s smile as she lay back on her bed, propped on her elbows; her knees swaying against mine; the down above her top lip, soft as sea anemone. And the shame that follows hard on all timidity, that pursues missed opportunity.
Call at 30 Rock was seven a.m., and waking early once again I could hear the TV in my parents’ room—soft music, voices. The sun was just about to rise. Mom’s door was cracked, so I knocked and entered. She was showered and dressed, her legs stretched on the bed, several tissues bunched in her fist. I lay down next to her and placed my head on her shoulder. Prince Charles and Prince Andrew, in full military uniform,were just entering Saint Paul’s Cathedral and shaking hands with the bishops. The organ boomed. Charles was the more weasel-faced of the pair, Andrew more gopher-cheeked and beaver-toothed than his brother. A gilded stagecoach, carrying Diana, was seen moving through London’s streets.And we await the moment,said the male newscaster,when this glass coach, which we can see without periscopes, comes to a stop…the door opens, and for the first time we see in all its glory that dress.Diana exited the fairy-tale vehicle with her whale-length train extended behind her. Two bridesmaids tended to its ends as she proceeded up the steps. The woman announcer said,What a dream she looks…a bride any man would be happy to see coming down the aisle toward him. The dress is made of yards of ivory pure silk taffeta, it has big sleeves with deep lace flounces at the elbow. It has avery,very long train, and if you asked a little girl to draw a princess, I think she’d draw a dress just like that.
I wondered if Amanda and Miss West, in a room at the hospital, were watching this together.
When I asked Mom why she was crying, she replied, “Because it’s all so lovely. Because Diana’s so young and so beautiful. And it makes me think about my wedding.”
“Your wedding makes you sad?”
“Just the time that’s passed,” Mom said. She occasionally spoke in mysteries like this, but it was too early to interrogate her about this one. She loudly sighed and laughed at herself, pressing both index fingers to her lower lids. “Off to torture my ladies,” she said. Then: “You and I have an appointment with Elliott this evening, at six.”
I got up the nerve to call Amanda before lunch, from my dressing room, and she answered. On the phone she was cordial, relieved. Everything was okay, she explained. Amazingly, her mother had done no major damage to her hand, it was a one-in-a-million injury not to have harmed any tendons or bones or arteries or nerves. All she’d needed was a tetanus shot and stitches, but she’d lose her grip strength for a few weeks. It was just very sore and wrapped in so many layers of gauze it looked like a Muppet, she said. Amanda was running around taking care of her, she had to pick up her antibiotics at the pharmacy. Could she call me later? she asked. Her rushed brightness felt like a stiff arm. Of course, I said. And she hung up.
My mood darkened, and for the rest of the day I was distracted on set. I regularly blew my lines, so that even Andy, who was usually forbearing, lost his patience with me. I brought no energy to my battle with archvillain Microwave Mike, and when I did, I got the choreography wrong and accidentally punched him in the mouth. When Alison, at day’s end, noticed how taciturn I was, she asked, with real interest, “How’d your date go?” to which I replied, “It was a disaster.” “Well,” she said encouragingly, “I thought you looked very handsome.” And in a moment of thoughtlessness that I regret to this day, I said, “Not handsome enough.” Which she took as a dig and nodded, as if I’d just confirmed some personal truth about helping people, and for the remainder of my time on the show, she never spoke to me again. When I arrived at Elliott’s office I was in something close to despair.
I had never been to Elliott’s during Mom’s midweek appointment, and every seat was taken in the waiting room. Standing between two chairs, I leaned down to ask Mom about this, and she said, “It’s almost August.” When I looked at her uncomprehendingly, she pulled me by the sleeve to whisper, “All the therapists go on vacation for the month. So everyone’s stuffing their cheeks with insight.”
When her session ended, Elliott appeared at his door, bleary and baggy-eyed. He seemed stooped and distracted, and when he spotted me, he paused, confused, as if he didn’t recognize who I was. For the first time in my life, I thought he looked old.
“Take a seat,” he said. He wrote some notes on his legal pad, then removed his readers and placed them in his breast pocket. He checked his watch. “I give you fifteen minutes,” he said, “you give me your world.”
It was to be, then, one of those hurry-up sessions, tacked on to Mom’s appointment, which Elliott occasionally did with Oren and me after Dad’s Saturday sessions. It was one of those instances when I was reminded that even though Elliott was my father’s best friend, or seemed to be; even though we were treated like special guests at all his parties, we were still customers of his attention, a fact I mostly did not reflect upon but, at that moment, decided somehow cheapened the advice and the fellowship, making both suspect. I wondered, as he rubbed his eyes before closing the door—this with an expression close to impatience—if he ever got sick of us, of everything we transferred upon him for failing to fix.
Instead of telling him about my evening with Amanda, I stuck to the surface, to work and its exasperations. To today’s fuckups and my enduring outlier, outcast status. To my lost summer.
Elliott was twiddling his thumbs.
“Am I boring you?” I asked. My anger shocked me.
Elliott stopped and chuckled. Then he shrugged. “You’re talking about this like a ten-year-old,” he said. He raised his voice several octaves: “Why me, boohoo.” From his jacket’s breast pocket, he removed his handkerchief and blew his nose. “Question: What do you like about acting?”
“I don’t…” I said. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“About the process. The art of it. Does itjazzyou? Do you have limitless energy for it? When you worked with Alan Hornbeam this spring, did you want to get to the beauty and truth of each scene? Or were you just watching the clock?”
“I’m not…” I said. “I don’t understand.”
“Why do you even do it?”
“Because I’m…good at it?”
“I askedyou.”
I slumped against the chairback and looked at his frog, which was either staring at the ceiling or giving me the side-eye, it was hard to tell. “Don’t I have to?”
“Do you?” Elliott asked.
“Can we go for a walk?”