Page 17 of Playworld
On the verge of becoming a man, there are times when I relished being a boy. Now, for instance, in the back seat of Naomi’s car. Having concluded my story, I leaned into her outstretched arms, burying my wet face in her neck. “Oh, baby,” she said, rocking me side to side. “You had a really bad day.” Memory being what it is, I often wonder how Iactuallytold her this tale. I’m sure it was more rudimentary, disorganized. That I’d hopped from one point of frustration to the next, so that it sounded like a list of complaints about a life that was unmanageable: I couldn’t keepup with acting, with school; I’d disappointed Miss Sullens, I couldn’t disappoint Coach; my father didn’t care. What Idoremember is this: when I’d finally calmed down, after Naomi took my cheeks in her palms and then kissed the corners of my eyes and pressed her lips to the edge of mine and I finally kissed her back—she suddenly stopped us. She made a great show of the effort this cost her as she gathered herself, although the effort was no act. And then she asked me a very simple question, one that revealed a key detail I’d left out and constituted the knot from which I could not figure out how to untangle myself.
“Why don’t you just quit?” Naomi whispered. “The show, acting, all of it.”
“Don’t you understand?” I said, as if it were obvious. “I pay for my private school.”
The Fifty-Minute Hour
So began several weeks in which Naomi and I talked almost every day. She had questions from our previous conversation that she’d thought about the night before; I had things I realized I’d forgotten to tell her during our evening apart. It was strange how quickly the time passed when we were together. It made me hurry to meet her. I could not get from school to her car fast enough. The Columbus Avenue bus took forever and then, once I was in the Mercedes, the three-block drive from Juilliard to the Dead Street seemed endless. Fall in full swing now, the trees in Lincoln Towers’ green space shed their leaves; beneath awnings, the heat lamps shined on passing pedestrians and conferred on them an orange rotisserie glow. With November’s approach, there was an entirely different quality to the light that on overcast days imparted to the sky a color closer to granite, to the Hudson an even more forbidding opacity, a solidity, as if ore might be transmuted to liquid not by heat but rather cold. Naomi parked; we hurried to the back seat; we pretended we were rushing because of the frigid gusts off the water, which made my tie ripple and stiffen and Naomi’s skirt snap. The doors slammed shut. Silence again. Often, we began to speak simultaneously. “You first,” Naomi said. At some point, after what seemed like only minutes later, she’d glance at her watch and, with a tone close to regret, say, “I’m afraid we’ve runout of time,” and my disappointment bordered on frustration, because it felt as if I was on the verge of something, of articulating a solution to a problem I could not name. It wasthisspeechlessness atthismoment that I found upsetting, a distress that Naomi seized on, and I allowed. She slid down in the seat; I did as well. With the back of her finger she might trace the line from my ear’s lobe to my lips. She regarded me with an expression somewhere between wonder and caution, between curiosity and fear. She liked to kiss my eyes next, which I closed; she kissed her way toward the edge of my mouth, until I finally kissed her back. She sometimes took my hand nearest her hip and firmly pressed it to her knee, indicating that I was to touch her there—that I could, if I wished, lift her skirt’s edge; that I was to feel her feeling my fingertips’ progress along her thigh—and I confess this frightened me. Until, as a gentle means of pausing us, as both bookmark and interruption but now more in imitation of restraint, the wordless sounds she made became laughter. There was a feline growl to it, which didn’t completely hide her nervousness and touched my heart. It was the only moment I thought she was acting.
Home soon and Mom had made dinner—tonight it was baked pork chops with mustard and rosemary and Rice-A-Roni, “the San Francisco treat,” Dad said hungrily as he took his seat to my left, though he couldn’t help shoot himself a look in the adjacent wall’s mirrors, which I always faced, and subtly suck in his gut. Oren, sitting across from him, duly noted this and, rolling his eyes, shook his head in private disgust. Mom, who sat directly across from me, blocked my reflection. “How was your day?” she asked. “Anything to report?”
“Not really,” I said, and—this still amazes me—I believed it.
Dad had already picked up his pork chop by its bone’s tips and was chomping away.
“What are you going as for Halloween?” I asked my brother, because I hadn’t given it a thought.
“Like I’m going to let you bite my style.”
Of course, if disguise is your natural state, coming up with a costume is no easy matter.
“How,” Naomi asked me one of these afternoons, “did you get started acting? Was it because of your father?” And I couldn’t help it—Iimitated the long stress on the word’s first syllable—fa-tha—which made her laugh and then play-slap me. I told her about my first television appearance. It took place at my elementary school, P.S. 59, when I was in Miss Epstein’s second grade class. She was an older lady, in her sixties. Even then Miss Epstein seemed a throwback: pearled cat-eyed glasses, schoolmarmish and severe in her wool dresses and white tights. Her heavy shoes clopped ominously as she patrolled our aisles. It was not unusual for her to rap my knuckles with a metal-edged ruler after I made a wisecrack.
On this particular morning, there came a knock at our classroom door. A young man entered, consulted a clipboard, and then called my name. I stood slowly, unsure if I was in trouble. When I looked to Miss Epstein for a sign, she flushed, clearly in on the game. “Wellgo,” she finally said.
The stranger led me downstairs to the library. Someone had taped black construction paper over the door’s window. The stranger knocked three times and then entered. The room had been entirely rearranged: its tables and chairs neatly stacked in the far corner. Thick black electrical cords snaked to a soundboard and a pair of klieg lights—the latter made the air stuffy and were aimed at a student’s desk, where the stranger ordered me to sit. Having grown up around an actor-father, I knew a set when I saw one and kept quiet. I faced a false wall that climbed almost to the ceiling, before which stood a director’s chair. A man got up from it to introduce himself. Over his shoulder I could see a small cutaway in the wood, flush against which was the camera’s lens, whose aperture narrowed, widened, and then went still.
The man, whom I immediately recognized, was Allen Funt, the host ofCandid Camera.He wore a light blue shirt with a paisley design, cerulean paramecia swimming across the shiny fabric. His pants were as white as his teeth and within a single shade of the band of hair above his high forehead. He bent toward me, with his hands on his knees, and pitched his voice low.
“We’re gonna have a talk, you and me, okay?” he said. “I’m gonna sit in that chair”—he wrapped his arm around his chest, pointing behind him, though he never took his eyes from mine—“and you just relax. Sound like a plan?”
I knew what was happening, just not what to expect. But I wanted to be on the show. So I nodded.
“Say whatever’s on your mind,” Funt added, and smiled. His teeth were fantastic, separate unto him, like furniture in his mouth. He returned to his seat. “So, Griffin, tell me something about yourself. You like baseball? Who’s your favorite team?”
“The Yankees.”
“What about football? Jets fan?”
“Giants.”
“Follow the fights? You a Frazier or Foreman guy?”
“I like Muhammad Ali.”
“Float like a butterfly…” Funt said, and pointed at me.
“Sting like a bee,” I replied, taking his cue.
“Think you can make up rhymes like that?”
“Sure,” I said.
And then Muhammad Ali appeared next to me. There’d been another student’s chair off camera, and Ali reached between his legs to take the small seat in hand and scoot up close. This action should have been awkward, but he glided soundlessly across the floor, moving with the frictionless ease I’ve come to recognize in all superior athletes, mere exertion something they deign to do, lest it sap energy they need to call upon later. He was wearing boxing shoes and a pair of shorts that readEverlastat the waistband, but nothing else. I detected a hint of glee as he stared me down. Even though I’d been ready for a surprise, I was not prepared to see the champ, and my reaction, in acting parlance, was big.
“Rhyme better than me?” Ali said. “I’m the greatest poet on the planet, ain’t met my peer. Got fists of thunder, a tongue like Shakespeare.”
And then he leaned forward, so that the effect was of a face arriving from far away.