Page 56 of Playworld

“Right,” I said.

We caught a streak of green lights, as far as I could see, although Naomi did not accelerate. “There’s the Museum of Natural History,” Naomi said. And at Seventy-Second Street she nodded toward the Dakota. “Over there’s where John Lennon got shot.” She read my mind and made a right, so we could drive past the entrance. People still laid flowers around the NYPD’s newly installed booth and along the building’s black railings.

“And this,” said Naomi, stopping a few moments later, “is where you get out.”

Oh, that gigantic X, as on a treasure map, where Columbus Avenue and Broadway intersected, where cars and pedestrians streamed in every direction, where people rose from and descended to the subway stations or shopped their wares on the nearby crossing island, knickknacks and foodstuffs, honey-roasted nuts and hot dogs, steam rising from theircarts and the orange-and-white tubes like colorful chimneys releasing the service lines’ condensation.

“Goodbye,” I said to Naomi.

“Goodbye,” she said.

The strangeness of saying goodbye, how I’d never thought of us or life in terms of goodbyes, how I’d never thought things ended. I opened the passenger door, exited the car; outside, I tapped the roof twice. I walked several steps facing backward, smiling at Naomi warmly, unabashedly; she returned this expression in kind, and, skipping now, stretching whatever hold she had on me until I passed Juilliard, I broke into a run, down the hill toward home. A blue sea wave swelled under my heart and, buoyed, I lengthened my stride. I believed that I had gotten away with something. That I’d been forgiven a debt, that this break was clean, my parting with Naomi final. A fact about which I was entirely wrong, and a lesson I’d already unlearned. Because very soon afterward, I fell in love.

Part Two

The

Reagan

Administration

We are at a turning point in our history. There are two paths to choose. One is a path I’ve warned about tonight, the path that leads to fragmentation and self-interest. Down that road lies a mistaken idea of freedom, the right to grasp for ourselves some advantage over others. That path would be one of constant conflict between narrow interests ending in chaos and immobility. It is a certain route to failure.

—Jimmy Carter, “Crisis of Confidence” speech, 1979

The Swimsuit Issue

At the beginning of February, only a few weeks after Reagan’s inauguration and just as my one-win wrestling season was winding down—the new academic term, with all of its clean-slate hopefulness, under way—Dad, at dinner, said that he had an announcement. “I’ve been offered a major part in Abe Fountain’s new musical.” He took Mom’s hand and squeezed it. “It’s practically the role of a lifetime.” Mom squeezed his hand back. “Rehearsals start in April, and then we go on the road in the summer. Which means I expect the both of you to help your mother hold down the fort while I’m gone.”

Oren and I had entirely different reactions to this news, though looking back, I am surprised I managed any sort of response at all, as agitated and astir as I was, as distracted and dreamy. I swear I sometimes wonder if it was simply because I was eating normally—that is, voraciously—again. All that nutrition snaking through my veins to fuel my final growth spurt, a burst that, rather than bulk my shoulders and chest, widen my thighs, or inflate my arms, instead initially made my extremities outsized, bestowing me with size thirteen feet and enlarging my hands to a breadth as paw-like as my father’s. What an odd-looking bird I was, mid-molt. Given my profession, plenty of pictures of me were taken. Given my age—I turned fifteen that month—my self-consciousness was acute. It wasn’t lost on me how closely Dad and I resembled each other, although my aquiline nose was subtly hooked at its tip, like Mom’s, and my hair, curly as Dad’s, was a tawny brown to his jet black, which I, desperately seeking contrast, grew nearly to my shoulders.

True, my body’s transformation was nowhere near as dramatic as what was taking place in my heart and mind, but these were still a trio of accelerants and each intensified the others. Longing, expectancy, waiting for…what? Oh, all the energy such a process produces, all the by-products! In my case, a tear or two shed at songs like “Yesterday,” “I’m Not in Love,” “You Light Up My Life,” or—this is the most embarrassing—Kenny Rogers’s “Lady,” which I often belted out in my study closet, headphones on (“And yes, oh yes, I’ll always want you near me / I’ve waited for you for so long!”). I wanted to be in love, I was in love with the idea of love,O Romeo, Romeo, be careful what you wish for, Romeo…

Another side effect of this was constant and unmanageable erections. Often in public places, notably classrooms, they demanding cross-legged techniques of concealment a magician would appreciate. I chanted mantras only a mad monk might (dead kittens, dead kittens, dead kittens), my tumescence so aggressively out of control, it required I, like some street fighter, play dirty and throw elbows at it, knocking it up toward the waistband of my briefs (I sometimes wore two pair to contain it), to peek out, from above my belt, at my shirt’s inner plackets; or down into the leg opening of my Fruit of the Looms, so rigid I walked out of class with a pronounced limp. It was all so unrelenting—I having had no one teach me how to even temporarily relieve this pressure and jerk off—I sometimes worried I had a disease. Not to mention confusing, especially since my verb had no object. It wasn’t Deb Peryton, though she and I were in English and American government together and those classes also bequeathed unto me wood. Nor was it Bridget, whose person was strictly aspirational, who lived in Virginia, after all, and whose last name I never caught. And it certainly wasn’t Naomi, out of sight and out of mind, not to mention any categories beyond what I was equipped to contemplate, let alone fantasize about.

Perhaps my dream girl helped to distract me from the reality of my grades, which were all, with the exception of English, gentlemen’s C’s,math nearer to a D, although it was my comments that were the most deflating. Two in particular stand out:

After a rough start to the year, Griffin rallied, turning in assignments on time and promptly completing labs. Lacks command of all basic scientific concepts. Always willing to answer questions, even if he has the wrong answer. Average: 77

Griffin wants to speak Spanish and is always willing to speak Spanish in spite of the fact that he can barely speak Spanish. He has only a tenuous understanding of grammar, but his accent is perfecto! Average: 76

I was keenly aware of my superficial, surface-level grasp of all my subjets. Elliott was quick to remind me of my potential, which Dad parroted. And I wanted immersion, depth, command! But I no more knew how to study than to beat my meat. Is it any surprise my thoughts drifted toward romance?

My dreams’ subject was, of course, veiled in mystery, was not yet an individuated she, though we had, in that future I so longed for, fallen deeply enamored with each other, and the romantic movie in which we starred was shot on several recognizable locations (a long stretch of beach, in the shadow of cliffs, atop which a bell tower tolled, its roof circled by martins; or the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where we’d found ourselves accidentally locked in, and through whose various kingly and queenly antique rooms my girl and I wandered before stepping over the velvet rope to finally bed down), all of which ended happily ever after.

Speaking of, Mom seemed so happy at Dad’s news it was a joy to behold, but Dad was even more thrilled, and his excitement briefly lifted a pall of anxiety I didn’t realize had long hung over our family. Was that another of the fire’s lingering scars? I, being in the same profession as Dad, knew what this opportunity meant for him. He had toiled for so long, and for a son to behold this is a suffering. All of which is to say, I was filled with hope. First for my future, since Dad’s and mine were so entangled that his success meant I could finally decide, for myself, how to spend my time; second, for our family, and all the attendantprosperity it would bequeath. Because if Dad was going to make it big, it would have to be on Broadway.

—

My father’s job title—actor—was a broad one, best defined negatively. He was not a television star, although he’d appeared, once, as a surgeon on the soap operaGeneral Hospital.This was a bit part, a walk-on in which he wore scrubs and a mask, the latter dangling around his neck, his character having just come from the operating theater to deliver news to the bereaved. In order to fully appreciate his line, you must imagine it spoken in his bass baritone—a rich, mellifluous instrument, almost British in its articulateness but lacking any highborn lilt. It was a decidedly masculine sound, tonally cleansed of his outer-borough idiom (Queens), as well as his mother’s Russian and father’s Hungarian accents—the pair squeezed, syllable by syllable, from his throat. It was only amplified by his diaphragmatic control, acquired at Juilliard, where he was classically trained in opera and enjoyed a full scholarship until quitting, mysteriously, after two years. His voice had a disembodied, disproportionate sound, which on first hearing could cause the listener a discordant shock, as when a demonically possessed girl speaks in the devil’s basso profundo. “We’ve stopped thebleeding,” he told the victim’s wife, “but we won’t know anything for certain until themorning.” He was not a ham, but I would come to think he revered acting too much, with a love too big for small screens, so that his portrayal—even one as insignificant as this—was self-parodying, unwittingly genius, like a great actor brilliantly impersonating a bad one. It was not the first time a performance of his made me uncomfortable.

Never once did he appear in a motion picture. But his voice did, as background noise in famous scenes. Acting was involved, of course, but off camera, in a recording studio, dubbed in postproduction, the lines improvised with other actors so as to create that familiar, indistinct din you might hear in a crowded restaurant—“room tone” being the term of art. Or, as I came to think of it, trying to single out his voice from the others as we sat in the darkened theater—watching, say,Day of the DolphinorLogan’s Run,or any number of the age-inappropriate films he took Oren and me to attend—Dad somewhere in the room.Not that my father didn’t enjoy the occasional star turn. Some of his lines becameiconic. He’s the first man heard screaming from a window inNetwork:“I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!” “Look,” you hear him say inSuperman,“up in the sky.” Or perhaps most famously inStar Wars:“These aren’t the droids we’re looking for.” After that movie’s meteoric success, it was not beyond him to tell a stranger who was curious about his profession that he’d had the pleasure of working with Sir Alec Guinness, that he wasthatstormtrooper inthatscene, even though he’d done the dubbing months later, in the U.S., and principal photography had been shot in Tunisia—a long time ago, in what might as well have been a galaxy far, far away.

That he’d never made it in movies was a source of pain for him, one he didn’t need to express for me to infer. I noticed the joy he took in my credits on film and television—the one-sheets fromThe Talon Effecthe kept rolled in a packing tube in my study closet, or how he insisted that NBC send him Betamax tapes of every episode ofThe Nuclear Family.It was nearly impossible to get him to come to a wrestling match, but he showed up on set now and then, and I occasionally caught him studying these tapes in his bedroom and, later, when we gathered at dinner, he might mention how I’d played a particular scene—an offhand gesture I’d made in response to a line, adding how “in character” I’d been. Given how little thought went into these performances—they were, on levels I didn’t fully comprehend then, involuntary—he might as well have remarked, mid-meal, that I was doing a fantastic job of swallowing.

Once, when the praise became too much, Oren chimed in: “He’s a Saturday morning superhero, not Laurence Olivier.”

“That doesn’t mean he doesn’t treat his work with professionalism,” Dad shot back.