My Old Man Read online

  “It’s Richard!” my dad called.

  The door slammed behind her. We all turned to look as they fought on the sidewalk without any sound. Liz put her hand on his arm pleadingly, Gordon shook her off, and then he stormed off and they both went out of view.

  “So what did you guys think of her?” I asked.

  “Quite a character,” said my mom.

  “Beautiful eyes,” said my dad.

  Who Killed My Wife?

  THE afternoon of Powell’s play I couldn’t do anything but pace around the apartment tearing at my hair. It wouldn’t have been so bad if I had a bigger place, but it was a totally crapola one-bedroom about the size of a small studio. When you opened the door you came into a hallway that was long enough to foster the expectation of a decent-sized pad, but when you got to the end you found yourself on one side of a minuscule living room, off of which was a tiny bedroom that had a doorway but no door. For a sense of separation I had hung a bamboo shade from Pearl River on Canal but it blocked no sound and no light. The bedroom itself was so cramped the only things it fit were my queen bed and armoire. To get to the bathroom you had to walk through the bedroom in the tiny aisle between the bed and the armoire, and unless your girth was less than two feet you couldn’t make it through at all.

  What my apartment lacked in space it did not make up for in accoutrements. All the other women at RCRJ were really into home décor. They were dark-skinned and hairy but wanted to be Martha Stewart. They lived in the West Village in apartments paid for by their parents, decorated with the kind of generic Pottery Barn crap that made them all look alike. Despite my disdain for the conformity, I envied them their fresh flowers, throw rugs, and unstained slipcovers. My slipcover stains never came out and whenever I bought plants they died in a day.

  Over the years I had done some minor improvements to my place, like caulking the holes in the floor, sweeping every six months, and hanging posters on the wall—The Apartment, The Way We Were, an album cover from the Silver Jews. But no matter how cozy I tried to make it, I couldn’t hide the views. The living room had two windows—one side faced the tennis bubble of New York Sports Club, and the other faced the Atlantic Avenue jail. I had rehabilitation in every direction. When I couldn’t fall asleep at night, I looked out at the tennis bubble and tried to pretend my bed was a berth of a ship and the bubble was Moby-Dick, bobbing away.

  An hour before I was supposed to leave for the play I opened the closet door. When I was at RCRJ I dressed weirder than most of my classmates—vintage dresses, knee-high combat boots, barrettes in my hair—but for the most part I didn’t show cleavage. But now that I was going to a play written by a certified ass man, a whole new set of rules applied. You could watch for the asses in Powell’s movies the way people looked for Ninas in Hirschfeld cartoons; each one featured an extraneous close-up butt shot that had nothing to do with the actual movie. I decided it would be to my advantage to highlight what I knew was his favorite feature, so I put on a tight knee-length pencil skirt that made me look like a secretary in the very best way. On top I wore a ribbed, beige wraparound that cut low but cost $120 at agnès b., and was therefore glam, not cheap.

  When I got to the theater I scanned the wrinkled pusses in search of an authoritative man but didn’t see anyone who paid more than a buck for the bus. Take away senior citizens and New York theater dies. You have to admire them for their loyalty but they make crappy audiences. They keep their coats on in the middle of summer and watch with morose expressions that say “I lived through Auschwitz. Now make me laugh.”

  My seat wasn’t bad—about five rows from the front, audience left. I opened the Playbill and discovered that the star attraction was Mira Sorvino. I was excited for Joey because this seemed like a truly big break for him, but I wondered whether Powell was having an affair with Mira. How could any director not have sex with his leading lady? It was practically a job requirement.

  As I was reading his credits, surprised to find that he’d included Flash Flood among them, I heard a loud male voice coming from the door. Like he was haloed in a fifty-thousand-watt spotlight, I saw him. His hair was curly and black, gray at the sideburns, and heavily receding, but he wore it slicked back and gelled like he wasn’t ashamed to be a baldy. He was clean-shaven except for his bushy mustache and he walked in the brusque self-important style of someone who’s made it big. Though his paunch wasn’t huge by any means, he displayed it with pride, like he was from a country where stomach commanded stature. He was wearing a button-down white shirt tucked into expensive-looking gabardine slacks and his eyelashes curled out as long as a woman’s.

  As he spoke he gesticulated in a fey way that threw me for a loop. He was saying, “And that was when I realized that ‘marriage’ is just a pretty word for ‘bankruptcy.’ ” At first I thought he was talking into a hands-free cell phone but as he moved I saw that trailing a bit behind him, just upstage, was a very attractive woman. She was blond, five-eleven, with white Carly Simon horse teeth and the blunt short cut that says I don’t need long hair to look hot. The blonde threw me for a bigger loop than Powell’s limp wrist. How could he write these ethnic fireplug women but enter on the arm of a shiksa?

  As they walked up the center aisle he laughed with her and tilted his head back. I waited for him to notice me but he was turned toward her, listening overeagerly. They sat a few rows behind me, on the opposite side. I turned my head around and willed him to look my way. As though I had a God-given power of influence I’d failed to pick up on in rabbinical school, his head started to turn toward me just slightly. Joey had been right. Powell was psychic. He must have smelled my interest from across the room. I watched that aquiline nose begin to make its way toward my own fleshy beak and just as our eyes were about to meet the lights dimmed and he turned to the stage. Art always trumps love. It’s so not fair.

  When the lights came up Joey was standing center stage on a sparse living room set, holding a gun to his temple. “A man who can’t work is worth nothing,” he said. “It’s like he’s missing a leg. Since I’m already missing a leg I decided I’d rather have no head.” He cocked the gun and just as he was about to pull the trigger there was a knock at the door. It turned out to be his maid Teresa (Mira Sorvino) coming to clean the house. He had to hide the gun so she wouldn’t find it, which involved running all over the apartment and finally selecting the freezer as the appropriate spot. From then on the entire play went downhill.

  It came off as an odd hybrid of screwball and melodrama—half the time people were chasing each other around the stage and the other half they were engaging in Powellsian monologues on the futility of living a happy life. By the time intermission came around, I could see why my parents had walked out.

  As the house lights came up for intermission I craned my neck back at Powell to glean his reaction. He was smiling proudly, like it was a close-up on him right after his Oscar clip had been shown. There was something so incongruous about the failure of the play and the pride of its maker. I couldn’t tell whether he was totally deluded or whether he knew he’d written a clunker and just didn’t care. The blonde hugged him and whispered something in his ear that made him laugh. I would have projectile vomited but the seats were raked.

  I pushed my way through the bluehairs, made my way to the lobby, and got on the concession stand line because I didn’t have anyone to talk to. Powell was nowhere in sight. Maybe he was deliberately staying in his seat so as not to be forced to mingle with the hoi polloi. The line was long and moved slowly, and judging by their comments the seniors didn’t like the play either. “This is no Producers,” said a woman in Larry King glasses to her husband.

  “Producers?” he said. “This is worse than Sweet Smell.”

  When I got to the front I bought an oatmeal cookie. As I was unwrapping it I spotted Powell coming in, sans blonde. He was scanning the room nervously, like he didn’t feel comfortable without his arm candy. Maybe he was going to buy some M&M’s to compensate.

&nbs
p; As his eyes cruised past me I gave him a huge Shirley Temple smile. He frowned in confusion, as though I was mistaking him for someone else, and I nodded my head up and down as slowly as I could. I felt like I was in a Molson commercial, but sometimes a girl can learn from beer.

  Suddenly he broke away from the throng and strode toward me with great purpose and a huge scowl. In the bad teen movie of my brain his gait seemed to switch into slo-mo. He was the football-player thug and I was the scrawny nerd against the locker who doesn’t know how to prepare.

  As he got closer the slow motion switched to regular motion again and he was standing right in front of me, glaring. Before I could think of something to say he darted his head down and took a big sloppy bite of my cookie. I jumped. He chewed deliberately, unapologetically, never moving his eyes from me, and then without a word he turned and slipped back into the crowd.

  My mouth was dry, my armpits dripping with sweat, my labia as swollen as the siliconed lips of a Hollywood has-been. I looked around to see if anyone else had noticed but they were all going on about the show, oblivious. I ran my finger along the U his mouth had left and touched my finger to my lips.

  THE second act had a little more energy than the first—there was a long scene where all the characters converged in Joey’s apartment to convince him life was worth living—but it didn’t add up. Mira and Joey eventually fell in love, and there were two dumb subplots involving her brother coming out as a gay man to his conservative Puerto Rican family, and Joey’s ex-wife ordering a hit on him.

  After the show Joey met me in the lobby. “You were amazing,” I told him, which he was, despite the questionable material. His eyes were red and I could tell he’d already smoked something upstairs.

  “We were totally off tonight,” he said. “All the beats were different.” Actors always had to give you TMI, too much information.

  We walked over to the loft where they were throwing the party, which was a few blocks from the theater, and Joey smoked some weed on the way. It was an early September night, the kind that makes you love the city, and as we walked I breathed in deep, and looked up at the stars, hoping Joey wouldn’t get arrested.

  The loft was sparse and huge, with a DJ in one corner, a beautiful spread of food, a full bar, and a separate table laid out with plastic champagne flutes. There were already fifty people there—a mix of cast members, hangers-on, and celebs: Billy Crudup, Ed Burns, Nathan Lane, and Ralph Fiennes. New York had so few parties compared to LA that celebrities all had to show up at the same ones. This was why they all ran the risk of becoming overexposed, not because they went out too much, but because there was so little to do.

  The DJ was playing “You Can Make It If You Try.” Powell was standing by the bar next to the blonde, deep in conversation with Ralph/Rafe/Raf. “So you want to meet Powell?” Joey asked.

  “He’s talking to Ralph Fiennes,” I said, blushing. “I don’t have to.”

  “Come on,” he said, taking my arm. “Let me just—”

  As he started to lead me over, a fey authoritarian raised a glass and tapped a knife against it. Saved by the nell. The DJ turned the music down, everyone got hushed, and a few caterers began distributing the glass trays. I took an extra-full glass. Joey didn’t take any. Stoners have contempt for alcohol. It’s an illogical but universal truth.

  “I just want to say congratulations to everyone involved in the production,” the fey guy said. “It was a great run and now we’re going to party till dawn!”

  Everyone raised their glasses and downed the champagne. I heard someone shout, “Say something, Hank!”

  Powell shook his head no but after a few of the other actors called out “Yeah, Hank! Don’t be shy!” he said, “All right already, if it’ll quiet you children down” and moved to the front of the room. They laughed in an overamused, phony way, and then got reverentially quiet. You get sycophantic when you realize you’re out of a job.

  “I couldn’t a done any a this without this stellar cast,” Powell said. His accent was flat New York, but his s was affected, his lips pursed like a theater queen’s. He was like Archie Bunker and Isaac Mizrahi rolled into one.

  “You guys were rowdy and you could be tardy—Robby,” he said, eyeing Mira’s brother to another round of raucous laughter, “but your enthusiasm carried me through. It almost gave me a second ulcer”—more overeager laughter—“but it carried me through. You made my first foray into the theater a ride. Not necessarily a smooth one, but a ride. Now leamme the fuck alone and get drunk.” He raised his glass to his lips and the whole cast cheered loudly.

  Joey went off to get me a drink and I sat down on an empty couch in a corner. I noticed my wraparound had sunk a little and my bra was peeking out. As I yanked the shirt up, I felt a shadow over me and when I looked up I was face-to-face with the scribe. He was peering at me with a kind of animal interest. I couldn’t believe he’d chosen me over all these stars.

  Before I realized quite what I was saying, I told him, “I don’t have anything else for you to bite.”

  “We’ll see about that,” he said, chuckling so deeply I almost couldn’t hear it. He squinted at me and rubbed his cheek. His eyes were steely blue-gray and looked like they could kill someone with one quick gaze. “Who are you?”

  “My name’s Rachel. I’m a friend of Joey’s.”

  He sat next to me on the couch, so close the side of his thigh touched mine. I felt a bead of sweat burst out of my upper lip, and then three more, like the test kernels when you’re popping popcorn. I looked around to see if anyone else had noticed he was sitting next to a total nobody but they were all caught up in conversation, and I wondered whether all of this was the weird hallucination of a groupie. “Are you afraid of me?” he said.

  “A little,” I said, looking at him sideways.

  “You should be. You should be very afraid.” I couldn’t tell if I was supposed to laugh. “Why did you come here?”

  “To see the show, but also…” My eyes felt wide, like a girl in a Keane painting. “But also because I wanted to meet you.”

  “And why did you want to meet me?”

  “Because I wanted to know if you were like your characters. I’ve seen all your movies.” It was an inevitable but crucial cliché—I figured it was better to seem educated than obsequious without due cause.

  “And what’s the verdict?”

  “It’s too soon to tell. I haven’t heard enough lines.”

  “You’re a politician! You’re very clever! What did you think of my play?” He reminded me of my biblical history professor at RCRJ, Ted Snyderman, who used to call on students randomly and ask us these incredibly specific questions about the reading, inevitably the one portion we hadn’t actually read.

  I wanted him to know I was smarter than the average groupie, but he seemed so proud of his work I was afraid to sink his ship. “It—it was a real departure from your films,” I said.

  “You didn’t like it.”

  “Well—”

  “I can handle it. Be honest. I can see the cogs turnin’ in ya head.”

  “I guess it just, didn’t quite hold up to what I had come to expect from Hank Powell.”

  “That’s right!” he said exuberantly. “It wasn’t meant to!”

  “Then why did you write it?”

  “I wanted to taste the fruit of something new.” I did too. I just hoped he wasn’t the new of something fruit.

  “Are you happy with how it turned out?”

  “Personally, yes. From an audience perspective, no. But I answered some questions about my own mortality that have been nagging me since birth. That’s the whole point of art—to answer the soul’s deepest questions.”

  “I guess it is,” I said, agreeing with the sentiment if not his execution.

  “I’ll tell you one thing, though,” he said. “I’m glad I mounted something.”

  “Me too,” I said. “But I hope this doesn’t mean you’ll stop mounting things in the future.” It was the
oddest thing. Something about Hank Powell made me want to one-up him. He chuckled and narrowed his eyes, like he was intrigued. I wanted him to toss me to the floor and stomp on me like grapes.

  Joey came over and grinned at us, like a stoner yenta. “I see you two met,” he said, handing me a beer. He was with Mira Sorvino, and the blonde Powell had come in with. Powell rose to his feet and kissed them both, but on the cheek. Mira looked good, like she was aging well. She had the kind of naturally curvaceous figure that people pay a lot of money for, and a radiant, megawatt smile. I felt intimidated because she’d gone to Harvard and wasn’t a run-of-the-mill actress. She wasn’t just hotter than I was; she’d gone to a better school.

  They pulled up a few chairs and sat across from us. Joey introduced Mira Sorvino, who said she was pleased to meet me. The blonde shook my hand and said her name was Kim. Anyone that good-looking had to be a Kim.

  “I’ll tell you my favorite thing about the play,” I said to Powell. “I liked how operatic it was.”

  “It’s funny you say that,” he said. “I hear that comment all the time about my movies and it never makes any sense.”

  “Why’s that?” Mira Sorvino asked. She was smiling at him like they had something going.

  “Because I experience life on a cosmic scale,” he said, pounding his chest with his fist. “Everyone else’s opera is my everyday existence.”

  “You mean like in Knock for Greenberg?” said Joey. “That was definitely your most operatic movie.”

  “ ‘Loving you isn’t something I choose or don’t choose, Constanza,’ ” I said, quoting Ron Silver’s heartbreaking monologue to Rosanna Arquette after they first make love on his kitchen floor. “ ‘It’s a disease creeping through my blood, infecting each of my cells like a lethal, incurable virus that leaves me sweaty and struggling to breathe.’ ”