Page 110 of Playworld

“Not today, kid, sorry.”

“I want an egg cream.”

“And I,” Elliott said with a heaviness I would later come to understand, “want more time.”

I crossed my arms. “Can I at least get a hint?”

“Young man,” he said, “your father’s got a voice from God. Your mother moves like an angel. You can breathe life into characters. Be that as it may, just because you have a talent doesn’t mean you have to use it.”

From the side table between us, he slid open its drawer and removed a small, wrapped box, which he placed on the desk.

“Go on,” Elliott said, “open it.”

It was a Space Pen.

“You’ve been eyeballing mine for so long I thought I’d get you your own. Give what I said a think and we’ll discuss in September.” Elliott unfolded his glasses, checked his watch, nodded toward the waiting room. “Now, off with you,” he said. “I got fires to put out.”

Mom wasn’t in the waiting room, so I left the office, figuring she was on the street. I emerged from the office’s long hallway into the city’s noise and evening’s falling brightness to spy my mother talking to Naomi.

They stood by Naomi’s Mercedes. She’d lucked into miraculous parking right out front. They were speaking animatedly, loudly, the sort of catchup that involved the touching of arms, a covering of mouths, laughter that vied with traffic noise, that reminded you how rarely you heard pedestrians in Manhattan talking. As my mother gestured, Naomi spotted me, and in that glance’s microsecond we were alone. I had not spoken with her since we’d said goodbye that January. She wore a summer suit made of white linen and was very tan. The spray of freckles dotting her nose and cheeks were darkened beneath her blue-tinted lenses. I felt a complicated relief, a need to collapse into her arms and tell her everything along with an imperative to pretend we were only family friends, when she did something unexpected. She reached out to me, snapping her fingers before I was within her grasp so imperiously it made me weak-kneed, and then she pulled me close.

“Look at Mr. Muscles here,” Naomi said, and made a great show of giving me a side hug, her eyes exaggeratedly widening at Mom as she patted my chest. “Six months, I don’t see him,” she said, “he’s like a grown man already.” And then, out of my mother’s view, she slid her hand from my side to secretly run her fingernails up and down the small of my back. She asked what I was up to, how it was going withThe Nuclear Family,poor baby locked inside all summer, Daddy’s gone, where’s your brother? The torrent of questions while her nails traced my spine had rendered me mute. They were a kind of cover, this peppering. My mouth went dry. I stiffened so instantaneously it was like a beak trying to break through my jean’s denim. I was embarrassed and paralyzed with desire. She said to Mom, “You should all come out to my brother’s beach house sometime, what with Shel on the road, and justrelax.” And here, as if for emphasis, she pressed her nails so hard against my shirt they nearly pierced my skin.

“We might just take you up on that,” Mom said.

Naomi checked her watch. “I’m late for my session,” she said, and released me to kiss Mom’s cheek with a loud pop. “Don’t be a stranger,” she ordered. She turned to kiss me as well, allowing her lips to touch the corner of my mouth, and had I not been so stunned, had my mother not been present, I’d have kissed her back, right there. She waved to me with a tiny flap of her hand and said, “Bye,Griffin.” And she hurried into Elliott’s office.

“That woman,” Mom said, the minute we were out of earshot, “is too much.”

In bed that night, all thoughts of Amanda were blown from my mind. Instead, I was standing with Naomi on the street. With a heat that, even now, has been undiminished by decades, the scene replayed—she asks me questions, but the sound of her voice is muffled and far away; I am at once light and heavy, buoyant and weighed down. I had at my disposal no subsequent scenes by which this fantasy might have played out. And because I was virginal in every way, because I could not imagine its fruition, I was trapped in it.Thatwas its power. To this day, I can conjure it, but there are times when it seems to conjure me, so that I wonder if it is Naomi’s doing,herpassing thought, some arcane aspect of our connection, current traveling down memory’s hot wire to arc across space and time. I confess I live in fear of seeing her. She could be decrepit, and I am certain that, in my presence, her youth and my desire would be restored. But that night, in my bed, I could summon no release. I flipped onto my stomach, burying my face in my pillow. With all my strength I gripped the bunk’s rails and pressed the balls of my feet to the frame, pinning myself to my mattress, because this exertion was my only relief.

—

On Friday, Oren, Mom, and I took the Amtrak to Philadelphia, to stay with Dad and seeSam and Sarain preview—our first glimpse of the musical front to back and out of rehearsal.

The Forrest Theatre was a historic building fashioned of white limestone. Its interior’s hues were a combination of peach and turquoise, its colossal chandelier, inset beneath its ornate, domed ceiling, loomed so massively I imagined it falling on the unwitting spectators. After checking into the hotel, we hurried to briefly meet Dad in his dressing roombeforehand to wish him luck. His costume was a tweed jacket and khakis. He wore a white button-down shirt, a red-and-blue varsity scarf knotted at his throat. His hair was sprayed blond. A prop pennant leaned against his vanity mirror. He looked like he was headed to a college football game. In the glance Oren and I shot each other, it wasn’t clear which we thought was funnier: Dad’s golden locks or the fact that he couldn’t tell an offensive tackle from a fullback. He was harried, happy, nervous, and preening, as he paced the small room. I forgot sometimes how much heavier stage makeup was than for television. His brightened face seemed to float, as if attached to his skull by a slightly loose spring. When Mom kissed him in parting, his foundation left a flesh-toned brushstroke on her cheek.

The show was about a pair of couples who are good friends and know each other over the course of their entire lives: Sara, who is engaged to Vern, an aspiring architect—played by Dad; and Sam, who is engaged to Ana. When the show begins, all four college seniors are celebrating homecoming weekend. The afternoon before the big game, the betrothed couples are introduced at a fraternity party, and the opening ensemble number is a nostalgic one entitled “Have You Declared?” Everyone is sharing their plans, how they’ll go from being economics majors to bankers, from biology majors to scientists, from single to married to families of four or six. But then Sam and Sara see each other across the room; the stage briefly goes dark, until the pair is cordoned off from each other but also privately entangled in their respective spotlights. It’s obvious that they have fallen in love, and the show’s entire conflict centers on whether they will leave their respective spouses in order to be together. The music’s tempo changes from fast to slow, and they sing only of the moment, of their feelings, of the present, which clouds their future, casting it and them in doubt.

“Too clever by half,” Mom said to me, clapping when it concluded, the applause neither muted nor overwhelming. The performance’s energy—that invisible cord connecting the actors to the audience—was perhaps partially diffused by the size of the crowd, which filled maybe half the house. Still, I trusted Mom to name what I could not put my finger on, which made both Oren and me fidgety, inattentive, which Inow recognize as a quality the musical lacked, an absence at its very core that manifested as an inability, from its start, to enchant.

“Do I have to watch this whole thing?” Oren whispered.

“Yes,” Mom said.

“Do I have to wear this tie all night?”

“You will sit in your seat and keep on your dress clothes,” Mom said.

What I recall was hoping things might change as the musical progressed. I remember rooting for it and for my father. There was a fantastic quartet number called “Alone at Last” that takes place on the couples’ honeymoon. Sam and Ana are in Italy while Vern and Sara are in Paris, Sam and Sara singing to each other while Vern and Ana swoon over their new spouses—a showstopper. Yet even at that moment, I recognized that the song somehow stoodtoofar above the others. Like all tour de force performances, it strangely threatened to destabilize the whole by setting the rest of the musical’s inferiority in stark relief. After its final, long-held note, which Vern and Ana hold together, there was a pause and then applause, nearer to an eruption, the cheering that followed pegged at an entirely different volume: sustained, and briefly contracting, and then expanding to swell once more, a murmuration that filled the theater with love and Oren, Mom, and me—at least I felt it—with hope.

The actress who played Sam’s wife, Ana, was a tall woman, full-figured and forceful, and she possessed a sort of raspy vividness. But it was only well after the curtain calls, when we met Dad again backstage, in the narrow hallway his dressing room gave onto, in the hubbub of the actors changing and milling about, greeting guests and fans—only when she exited her dressing room, having removed her blond wig and makeup, that I realized she was the same woman I’d seen my father talking to that day, many months ago, on the Upper West Side, seated on the statue in Columbus Circle. The woman he’d lied to me about, whose face I’d picked out on his wall of headshots. She hesitated at her dressing room door, seeing that we blocked her path. Dad seemed to sense her presence and, looking over his shoulder, said far too loudly, “Katie.” In response to his summons, she gave him a hot look, one close to annoyance—she was like an unwilling audience member being called up onstage—and then reluctantly approached. It was this reluctance, so quickly discarded,so rapidly exchanged for a kind of enthusiasm, that distinguished her from my mother, that marked her as my mother’s diametrical opposite, and therefore presented an enormous threat. Her earrings were large and hooped; her fingers beringed, their metals thick and heavy; the pendant arrow on her necklace pointed toward her big boobs.

As if all three adults—my father, my mother, and the woman—were suddenly as translucent as jellyfish, I imagined I spied my father’s increased heart rate, which he tried to cloak in noise; Mom’s lungs shrank as she slowly emptied them of all breath; the woman’s blood vessels narrowed so that their currents quickened. Katie, her dark eyes no longer accusatory, allowed her features to soften and, reaching a hand out to my mother, said, “Lily, it’s so nice to meet you.” To which Mom said only, “You too.” And when they shook hands, Oren looked at Mom, whose silent wrath was both familiar and terrible, and then at me with a baffled expression.

Dad, no matter how hard I wished him to shut up, pressed forward. “Katie,” he said to Mom, “was in the chorus ofThe Fisher King.”

Katie nodded at Dad and then at Mom. “I was,” she said, as if my mother hadn’t heard him.