Page 93 of Playworld

“Where are you going?” she asked.

“To dinner.”

From our bedroom, Oren shouted, “With a girl.”

“Oh,” Mom said, and smiled. “Just the two of you?”

“And I think her dad,” I said.

Mom gave me the once-over. “Then go put on some khakis and a button-down.” When I rolled my eyes she said, “Loafers too.”

“I’m gonna be late.”

“Go,”she said.

I lurched back to my room to change and shambled back for inspection right as Dad was pulling up his chair. “I hear you have a hot date,” he said.

“He’s meeting her father,” Mom said.

“He can’t wear that shirt then,” Dad said.

“Why?”I groaned.

“It’s wrinkled.”

“I have togo.”

He snapped his fingers three times quick. “Give it to me,” Dad said. He pushed back from the table and went to the kitchen. He emerged with the ironing board and folded open the legs, and its wire made its subway screech. He waved to me—c’mon, c’mon—to hand him the shirt, which I removed and then sat down on the couch, topless, burning with impatience and shame as my back stuck to the leather. He returned with the iron and plugged it in. The signal lamp was red. After another trip to the kitchen, Dad appeared with a can of spray starch and a measuring cup full of water. He carefully poured the latter into the iron’s nostril. He waited until the iron burbled and sighed. Dad did a cuff first, spreading it over the board’s nose, hitting it with some starch and a puff of steam, and then stretched out the sleeve, running the sole plate along its hemline with a couple of farty pumps of the spray button. I could see Dad’s reflection in the framed painting’s glass, the one above the living room’s console table of a bouquet that had survived the fire. His expression was focused and calm, and now, as he ran the iron’s nose between the shirt’s plackets, steam chuffed merrily from the machine. Then he flipped over the shirt to do the back. Finally, after setting the iron on its heel, he hooked the shirt by the hanging loop and held it out to me on his index finger. It appeared slightly boxy and sculptural. Buoyant, so that it twirled ever so slightly, like a mobile.

When I put it on, he said, “Better.” Then he kissed my forehead and patted my cheek. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”

—

I took the Broadway bus uptown. I sat in the back. Something about the starched shirt made me feel like I was in a costume. That my current determination for tonight to go well was also a put-on. That my resolve, as currently stiff as my shirt’s collar, would go soft and yellow the moment I was made to sweat. I stared out the window and took comfort in the familiar sights. The Seventy-Second Street subway station house, fashioned of granite and brick, exhaled passengers onto the crossing island where Amsterdam and Broadway intersected. The Apple Bank, the protuberant wrought-iron window guards of which were shapedlike my grandmother’s suet feeders. Hanging braids of garlic swayed in the breeze above boxes of fruits and vegetables at the Fairway Market. We passed the Apthorp Building—it had an interior courtyard, visible through its entryway’s arch, before which Mom once took my shoulders to stop me in my tracks and pointed to an older gentleman wearing a bright silk scarf around his neck. (“That,” she whispered behind me, “is George Balanchine.”) We crossed Ninety-Sixth Street, and soon I was walking down Amanda’s block, the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine walling off my eastern view.

Standing in the foyer of Amanda’s building, I foundWeston the buzzer panel and pressed the button. Her mother said, “Who is it?” over the microphone. The moment I replied, the door buzzed and stayed buzzing for a good ten seconds after I’d entered. The lobby was dark. As I waited for the elevator, I noticed one of the bulbs in the overhead was dead. The floor was fashioned of black and white tile and smelled sharply of piss.

Miss West greeted me at their apartment door. “Come in,” she said, having already turned, and, waving, beckoned me to follow her down a narrow hallway. I noted a small kitchen to my left and, straight ahead, a bedroom whose door was closed and from which music played. I stepped through a pair of French doors to my right, into a living room, where Miss West took a seat on the sofa and an already lit cigarette from the ashtray. The wallpaper was gray, pocked and torn in places, and faded. The windows were soot-covered, and this further dimmed the light. It occurred to me, in a flash, that on the continuum of people I knew—from the Adlers and Pilchards and Dolinskis, to the Shahs and the Barrs and the Pottses, and then Cliffnotes’s family and mine—Amanda’s mother was the closest thing I knew to poor.

I extended the bouquet of roses I’d bought toward her.

“Oh, these are lovely.” Miss West ashed her cigarette and took the flowers in her free hand. She briefly smiled after considering them. “No wonder you’re not her type,” she said, and then strode to the kitchen.

I heard the plastic wrap crumpling (my heart), scissors snipping (my head), faucet running (my blood), a cabinet squeak and then bang shut (my hopes). The only illumination in the room came from Miss West’s ham radio, whose components sat on a catty-cornered desk, the facesabove its several knobs backlit. Miss West had returned with a vase and placed the flowers on the coffee table. She was markedly taller than Amanda but also broad-shouldered; she had thick arms and she looked at me with something between disregard and pity. Her interest, I felt, could suddenly turn dangerous. She had blue eyes, larger than her daughter’s. She and Amanda shared the same complexion and coloring—she too was blond, though she wore her hair short—with identical noses, their tips lightly crimped down the center. But there the similarity ended. Miss West took a long pull on her cigarette, and the cherry flared brightly as it crawled down the paper. After she crushed it out, she said, “You’re the actor Amanda was telling me about. The boy who was inThe Talon Effect.I loved that movie. Though I told Amanda I couldn’t for the life of me remember anything about your performance. Didn’t you play the son of Rip Torn?”

“You’re thinking of Roy Scheider. Torn played the double agent.”

“Is Rip Torn his real name? I’ve always wondered.”

“He told me it was a nickname.”

“It’s mostly the Jews who have stage names,” Miss West said. “Like Lauren Bacall. Or Tony Curtis. I have a friend I talk to in Hungary who keeps a list of them. You know Han Solo?”

“You mean Harrison Ford?”

“Jew,” she said. Then she looked over my shoulder. “Look who’s finally ready.”

I turned to face Amanda. I said hello, though I was not sure if the word came out. I realized, as I stared, that I had only ever seen her in her school uniform and without makeup. She waited between the French doors in a black dress and a pair of gold necklaces. She had pulled her hair back and tied it off. Her feet, tipped into black heels, made her as tall as I was. I thought of all the makeup chairs I had sat in, how other actors had what seemed a new face put on once they were through. But in Amanda’s case, in lipstick and eyeliner, what was revealed was the woman she would become, the thousand ships she might launch. That she seemed entirely unaware of this power’s limitlessness made it all the more impressive.