Chapter 4
Susan flings her arms around a man she has never met. She holds him for a lifetime of a moment, and the two of them sway together as though they have done this a thousand times, as though they are remembering a long-gone slow dance from their youth.
“Are you okay?” she asks softly.
“Sure,” he says. They pull away and she searches his great green eyes, runs a hand over his tanned and shapely arms.
“Is this just a onetime thing?” she asks. The words bubble out of her mouth as though they are her own words, as though they have always been hers, as though she means every one of them.
“No,” he says. “Well, I don’t know. I’ll have to talk to Sharon.”
Tears well up, but she doesn’t release them. “Sure,” she says.
“You know I love you, right?”
She nods. She presses the back of his hand. “I know.” Her eyes follow him out of the door. “Merry Christmas,” she says softly, as though there is no one else in the room, as though she is as alone now as she will ever be.
A smattering of applause from behind a plastic table.
“That was lovely, Susan.”
Now she smiles, relieved—charmed, even—and registers the three faces illuminated by the top-floor window of the Burbank studio.
Two men and a woman. Mark Flowers: the producer, small mouth and large tinted frames.
Rip McFee: a writer, mullet, dimples. Shona Sussman: casting director, Texas accent, swiveling back and forth on her chair.
For Susan, it is almost too easy to become an ingenue again.
The transition is a wading into water. She slipped into it at thirty thousand feet, pouring out a small bottle of wine and watching America present itself, green patchwork fields and silver cities.
She offers it now to the starry, searching faces across from her, that heady mix of hope and potential.
“We have a few more people to see today,” Shona says tentatively. “But as I said on the phone, I’m looking for that person who just sets me on fire.” She cracks a bright giveaway grin.
“Why don’t we meet later for a drink,” Mark says. “To talk next steps.”
Susan is beaming, repeating the name of a place on Sunset Strip.
Even as she crosses the holding pen full of similarly dressed women, all gossiping or muttering lines or sitting silently while they wait for their call, she knows she is set apart. The only trick will be convincing Al.
He never stopped calling her. Without coyness or any of the wait-by-the-phone assholery she was used to, he asked for her time.
They drove out to the mountains, camped under the stars.
Both of them carried the same native injury, a disappointment in the people who raised them, a deficiency of love.
These were wrongs he was determined not to repeat.
When they met babies, Al spoke to them so seriously, and it made her lust for him, his solid sense of self.
Late at night, he practiced his lectures with her.
Though she could hardly follow the jargon, she coached his presentation: slow down, talk from your stomach, look at my face.
He improved. The Harvard undergraduates started calling him Blister, which he said he hated, but she could see he really loved. He’d never had a nickname before.
As the romantic spontaneity subsided, he began to reveal his habits.
He studied religiously from nine in the morning to noon, and then wrote in the afternoon from one to six, permitting no disturbance.
On Sundays, he drove to visit his mother in Rockport up on Cape Ann, always bearing flowers and an excuse to leave.
He took Susan to his favorite sandwich bar, where all of the options were named after poets and everyone behind the counter greeted him with the warmth of a regular; he had been coming since it opened twenty years ago.
She began to see that Boston had shaped him intimately, and he held an almost mystical understanding of its layers.
He populated the harbor with billowing ghost ships, extracted hidden spires and domes from the sheet glass and concrete.
Everywhere they went, he pointed out the ancient haunts of intellectuals and politicians, talked about their interests and ideas as though they were as alive in the world as anyone else.
Susan didn’t have a savings account. She didn’t have a car. He gave her one of the small black notebooks he used to manage his own finances, and drew a line down the middle of the page: one side represented what would come in, the other what would come out.
“I’m so bad at this.”
“Don’t worry, anyone can learn this stuff.
And anyway, you won’t need to worry about it forever.
” He smiled and she smiled back, understanding this as an expression of faith in her eventual earnings, in her raw talent.
Deploying his large, polite vocabulary, he drafted her resignation from the reenactment show.
One Saturday morning, he arrived at her mother’s house to pack her things into his trunk.
Susan was wearing a cardigan he had bought her, clean and white, and walked out of the house decisively.
She had hoped for more fanfare, but Sadie did not come down.
And her mother, moving things aimlessly around in the small front yard, simply held up her soiled hands in lieu of a hug.
“I guess that’s it then,” she said. When Susan closed the car door behind her, she put a hand over her face and exhaled endlessly.
She did not cry until they arrived at his apartment and she saw that he had shifted the bed, emptied out a set of drawers for her clothing. In the corner of the living room was a shiny black television. He smiled his handsome, lopsided smile and she was overwhelmed.
“Why are you being so nice?” she sobbed.
“One day, I’m going to need you to be nice to me,” he said. “When you’re a star of the stage and you can have anyone in the world.”
At night, after he’d indulged her in an hour of MTV, her hand rested limp against the warmth of his back and she felt—for the first time that she could remember—carefree.
But the problem was: in Boston there were no auditions.
Or at least not enough to keep her busy.
In six months, she landed only a single moisturizer commercial.
She wasn’t right for anything. Student gigs wouldn’t have her, and the few professional troupes passed her over.
Al started leaving clippings on the kitchen table: a role at Plymouth Plantation, a voiceover for an audio textbook, a radio spot for a local mortgage supplier. She could not bring herself to apply.
“How about teaching?” he suggested one day. “You’re so good with kids.”
The proposal crushed her more than she could possibly say.
It was not unreasonable. She had contributed nothing to the rent.
And she could see it came from his own earnest love of classrooms. He adored his students: their intelligent questions, the reflection of his efforts in their thoughts.
But his casualness made her question whether he had truly believed in her success in the first place.
She felt herself changing into an uncertain creature—estranged, for the first time, from her dreams.
Each day, relief arrived in familiar cymbals, those chords, the regular voices of Cedardale, USA, a disaster-prone town in middle America.
This is Life and Times.
Susan fell headfirst into the stories, a tangle of mysteries and romances, cryptic calls to a local radio station, a small-town matriarch interfering with her son’s chosen match.
All sense of her failure vanished. After every show, she called Sadie to debrief.
It was a way to talk without talking about themselves.
She became dependent upon it. When a dentist appointment caused her to miss a critical episode, she spent the evening despondent, mushing her lobster bisque at the Seaport restaurant where Al brought her for dinner.
“Explain it to me,” Al said. “It’s just so melodramatic.”
“You’re dismissing it because of the packaging.”
“And the stories.”
“Okay, but—every day you just never know what you’re going to see. People are always ascending and descending. No one’s position in life is fixed.”
“So it’s about social mobility?”
“No, it’s—the potential.”
“The potential to… discover a long-lost twin?”
He laughed unconvinced, and frustration welled inside her. I’m being inarticulate, she thought. But fundamentally, he did not understand the need to escape reality.
It was Sadie who saw the casting call at the back of a fan magazine. “If you don’t go for it, I’ll kill you,” she said.
So, Susan sent her headshot to Los Angeles. She told herself it was an exercise, that they would never look at her, that her experience in film was limited to the moisturizer commercial. Assuming it impossible made it easier to avoid the disturbing incompatibility of her desires.
When the call came asking her to audition, it felt like a fantasy. Like that ancient dream of being chosen—at last—was coming to life. In her hand, the receiver trembled with delicious beginnings. The tentative, sensual unknown.
“Are you sure you’ll be okay out on your own?”
“Don’t look so worried.”
“I’m just saying, the homicide rate is a serious concern.”
He was pacing and she could tell something else was bothering him. For Al, the unknown was full of demons.
“Why don’t you come,” she suggested. “Be my bodyguard.”
“That’s a good idea.” He said it so gently that she felt within her a dangerous reprieve: the hope she really could have everything she wanted.
“She’s a good girl gone bad.” Susan is tipsy, radiating wonder and a terrible ecstasy on the lawn in front of the seaside hotel. “Knows the streets a little too well. Troubled. Vengeful. Wheedling secrets out of smitten johns. I just honestly can’t believe it, Al, I can’t believe they want me.”
Al’s heart is beating in his throat. His dream is liquid in his fingertips, threatening to slip away.
“Susie,” he manages, “who wouldn’t want you?”
All day he had wandered Los Angeles’s vapid modernity and hideous perfume of gasoline and marijuana, wondering whether this was just a test. If it was, he couldn’t blame her; Susie grew up in a home where love was an uncertain thing. She required a grand gesture.
So, he had flown on the horrible, turbulent plane and booked the hotel room with the romantic view and the dinner tonight, which she hardly ate (so nervous was she to meet that man—Mark?
Mack?), because he knew he needed to communicate to her, powerfully, his devotion.
His pocket is heavy with the weight of his intentions, the string of words which were now—
“Let’s get married.”
None of it matters. Not the job offer or the strange ocean crashing into the night or the other guests who may or may not be watching from their windows.
He is thinking only how much he needs her, this woman who makes him feel essential and unlike himself.
He digs his hand into his pocket and pulls out an expensive velvet box.
Susan drops to a squat on the ground, clutching her face. “Oh God,” she says. She looks at the large yellow diamond, which he had chosen for its sparkle, because it made him think of her and them together, because it was not obvious but it was beautiful. Her face is open, an orchestra of feeling.
“You’re right, I should be down on one knee,” he says, kneeling nervously into the wet grass.
She pulls her hand away from her face. “You would move here?”
The box sits in his hand like a dead animal.
He is trying to fix his face, to look reasonable and supportive, but how would that possibly work?
This is a town of typecasting. Every hedonist here—New Agers, punk rockers, surf bums—eyes him like he’s a square.
Next month he will turn thirty, and somehow, he has passed the point of reinvention.
He knows what he is: a scholar who has staked his reputation on colonial America.
How could he live here, bereft of museums or primary sources, lost for the ideals that founded this country: efficiency, thrift, intellect.
He can imagine the glassy-eyed coeds mooning up at him, resentfully fulfilling a requirement, the deep training of his mind lost in an academic wasteland.
How could he be confronted with it daily and maintain his sense of worth?
It stung him beyond admission, that she could want something so far from him.
“You don’t want to keep going for more roles? You know you don’t have to jump at the first opportunity, Susie. You could do anything you set your mind to. You could be… Lady Macbeth.”
“I could still be Lady Macbeth!”
“I just think. People see you in a certain way…”
What is he doing? There will be no talking her out of this. Framing it as an ultimatum will only agitate her. She is rocking onto the balls of her feet, grappling.
“That’s not the point,” he says. “The point is, this assistant professor role is tenure track. It’s not like they just hand these things out. I can’t just leave.”
“Right,” she says. “No, of course not. But maybe eventually—”
“Sure, Susie, we can talk about it—”
“You know because at some point we’ll want a family.”
“You are going to be such a gorgeous mother.”
“And you are going to be a very paranoid but ultimately lovable father.”
“Susie?”
“Yes?”
“You haven’t said yes.”
If you look very closely, history is not a straight line.
It is full of the punctures of accident, plagues, and coincidence.
But if you zoom out, it is more or less straight.
Tending toward advancement, toward civilizations civilizing, toward people living longer and better and more enlightened lives.
“Yes,” she says.
“Yes?”
“Yes.”
He slips the ring from its bed and places it onto her long, beautiful finger.