Page 57 of Playworld

To which Mom said to me, as if I were both confidant and conspirator, “One girl, that’s all I wanted.”

Watching Dad do voiceovers was impressive. Picture a recording studio and my father in the live room or an isolation booth, on the other side of the control room’s soundproof glass. He’s wearing headphones. On a stand rests the sheets with the ad copy. There’s a digital clock atop the mixing console that counts down the time sequences. “Shel,” says the engineer, “I need you to shave two seconds off that last take.” And uncannily, expertly, exactly, my father would. It wasn’t just his efficiency,which was welcome, given the cost of studio time, but his prodigious command of tone, the humor or pathos he could inject into commercial copy, that added to his value. He’d knock out as many as three to ten spots in an hour, sometimes even more, and make enough to cover a month’s expenses in that compressed span. But then he might not do another commercial for weeks, sometimes longer.

During these dry spells, when I was in elementary school and auditioning, I might meet him at his midtown studio, across from Carnegie Hall, or run into him at one of the ad agencies where we’d both been to go-sees, and we’d walk home together. I equated his distraction with suffering and considered it my job to comfort him. Were these efforts of mine to be sweet what made him at once magnanimous and miserable as we walked home? Did I, his dependent, so eager to cheer him up, remind him of his failings as a father? Crossing from the East Side to the West, Dad was regularly indrawn, eyes to asphalt. This angst made it easy to convince him to stop for a snack, since it comforted him to feed me and gave him an excuse to stress eat: he’d get me a slice of cheesecake at Wolf’s Delicatessen (“Just to make sure it isn’t poison,” he’d say, and, with his knife, neatly scalp the dessert’s graham cracker crust), or, if no crosstown bus was in sight by the time we’d reached Seventh Avenue, we’d stop at the counter of Chock Full o’ Nuts, so Dad could peacefully brood and occasionally graze while I pigged out.

“How come you never did movies?” I once asked him.

Dad helped himself to one of my doughnuts. He talked while he chewed. “Quinn was supposed to get me into pictures,” Dad said, “but he didn’t come through.” When your father is a large and intimidating man and you are a comparatively tiny and successful pro, one who knows something of how the business works, it is uncommon, at best, to call such a person on his bullshit. Dad shook his head and swigged his coffee; it was probably his tenth cup of the day. Thank God he wasn’t a drinker. With my napkin, I wiped the powdered sugar from the corner of his mouth.

“Thanks,” he said, “I needed that.”

Thatwas both Aqua Velva aftershave’s tagline and a tic of my father’s as he moved through the city. He’d eye a movie poster lining a construction site or one posted on a billboard and read its copy aloud.“In space,”Dad said—to me, to himself, to the air—“no one can hear you scream.”Or walking by a liquor store:“We will sell no wine before its time.”Or through a sanitation truck’s pungent cone of odor:“People start pollution. People can stop it.”I had a far higher tolerance for these impromptu performances than Oren because I was rooting for him to not only land one of those multiyear, national network accounts with its game-changing residuals but also one day be the famous personality with whom a product was associated—like Ricardo Montalbán for Chrysler or Bill Cosby for Jell-O. Perhapsthenhis anxiety would finally be alleviated. Land a fish like that, and it would be game over. The old man could finally retire from the sea.

Thus, some sort of career-defining role was to be desired, for professional reasons and financial purposes. There were riches in recognition, in becoming a brand name, but he could see no path toward it, couldmakeno path toward it, since he was, in the end, waiting to be the chosen and at the mercy of others, no matter how hard he kept at it. “The problem with my business,” Dad once said to me on one of these walks, and here I sniffed out an Elliott aphorism, “is that there’s no graduation system.” If he could enjoy just one great stretch—if he could have, as he sometimes liked to say, a bucket when it rained—I might not discover him, as I did sometimes, in the living room in the middle of the night, sitting on the couch with the light on, his brown-and-black-striped robe, the one that had survived the fire, hanging open as he sat staring at the wall, sawing at his lip with his index finger as if it were a violin’s bow, entirely unaware of me as I walked past him to get a late-night snack. “Dad,” I said, briefly interrupting his ruminating, “are you okay?”

“I’m fine, boychik,” he’d say, “why don’t you go get some rest?”

He’d make Oren and me breakfast the next morning, looking even more haggard and unkempt, and was soon off to the YMCA, where he had a membership at the Businessman’s Club and where he went every morning for a light workout, followed by a steam and a shower and a shave, “to get myself together,” he liked to say. It was more often at night, when he returned home, that we got a look at the person he was out in the world during the day.

My father could be vain, but only in public. For his own reflection he had a sixth sense, and he was incapable of passing a mirror or storefrontwindow without checking his profile, subtly sucking in his cheeks. But at home he suffered far less self-regard: in the mornings, he often paraded around our small apartment in only a shirt, socks, and briefs—his storkish, hairless legs pale as his underwear’s cotton—even when Oren and I had friends sleep over. After bathing, he sat on the living room’s sofa, enrobed and reading theTimes.He might allow his gown’s flap to fall open, revealing his enormous nakedness underneath, upon which he’d scratch his scrotum as innocently as a zoo ape. Nor was he ashamed of his fake teeth. A pair of bridges spanned the cuspids on both his upper and lower jaw. So it was that, when Oren and I were little, if we came upon him scraping these with his dentist’s excavator or surprised him preparing the gray paste that secured these fakes to his gums, he’d turn on us and broadly smile, spooking us by this glimpse into his mouth’s inner workings; or he’d make a bogeyman howl, as if we’d discovered his true, monstrous identity, then stick out his tongue through the enormous gap until we covered our eyes and fled screaming. Throughout my childhood, the story he always told was that his originals were too small and thus gave him a smile unfit for stage or screen, so he’d had “some light cosmetic work done” to address the problem. This sounded like a perfectly reasonable answer, and I accepted it, though when I discovered in his dresser pictures of him as a teenager and, later, as a navy seaman, I thought they looked absolutely proportional—which, I’d learn later that year, they had been.

During my dad’s dry spells, he still made it a point to work. He gave his days something like a nine-to-five by teaching singing and commercial voice at the studio he rented on Seventh Avenue. He had an upright piano here as well as recording equipment. He also did the headshots of some of his students. He’d been a photographer in the navy, had been drafted during the Korean War but saw no action, tooling around the Mediterranean instead on a heavy cruiser, another chapter in his life I knew next to nothing about. He took my headshots as well, and Ihatedthese sessions. They were usually conducted in Central Park, and were some of the more painful exercises in false spontaneity of my young life. To mitigate embarrassment and be as far from the weekend sunbathers as possible, I demanded we conduct the shoot by the exposed rocksat the field’s southernmost end. Dad posed me in ways I hated: With my hands to my sides. With my body turned sideways. With my arms crossed.

“Look down,” Dad said. “Now up.”

“Stop squinting,” he ordered.“And open your eyes.”

“How about a smile?” Dad asked, holding his Nikon at his belt. “You call that a smile?”

Determined to be miserable, I had fixed my face in a frown, which Dad considered for a moment, his cheeks inflating, until he exploded in laughter. It made my misery more complete because it threatened to decouple my expression from my feelings. Sensing I was close to breaking character, he lifted the viewfinder to his eye. In the lens, I caught sight of my face, my mouth clownishly downturned, and, made suddenly aware of how proximate strong passion is to its opposite, began to laugh myself, furious. (Mom, it’s worth mentioning, was a far more willing model than I. Dad might ask to shoot her, of a regular Saturday, and these pictures, which I also found in my study closet, had an intimacy, a frankness, a seductiveness, that even then I recognized as reserved for Dad only.)

My mother taught children at Neubert Ballet in the afternoons, a job—though Dad could barely bring himself to call it one—that left her days open to get her BA at Columbia and, for the past several years, her MA in literature at NYU, the latter pursuit one that occasionally drove him nuts. They often fought about this, sometimes openly, at the dinner table.

“What do you do with a degree like that?” my father might ask. “Do you teach? Like maybe at Griffin’s school?”

“You mean English?” she said.

“You could get us a break on tuition,” Dad said. “Even health insurance.”

“I do it for myself,” Mom said.

“What about becoming a secretary, then?” Dad asked. “For an executive. Or maybe writing a novel.”

“What are you even talking about?”

“You could be a speechwriter. For a corporation. I see those ads in the paper all the time.”

“Why don’t you mind your own business?” Mom said.

“Your businessismy business,” Dad said, “because it’s our business. The family business.”

“Why don’t you do jingles then?” Mom asked. “Georgette Fox makes all kinds of money doing that.”

“You know my rule about jingles.”

“What about copyediting?” Oren asked Mom.

Mom, stunned, glared at my brother. “Excuse me, young man, since when do you give me professional advice?”