Playworld

Buster

Union Buster

In the year that I returned home from college and began seeing Elliott again—the year that I began to open up to him in ways I was incapable of as a boy—he said to me that we process all trauma like the oyster.

We pearl the dangerous particle, if we are lucky, into something precious, into the gift.

He never explained what that gift was, or what happened if we are less than lucky, because he and I ran out of time.

Only in our final sessions before he died would I return to the site of my selfhood’s inception—not to the fire, to the panicked flight of our family from our burning home, but to the moment, as Dad walked me down the hallway from Al and Neal’s apartment to our incinerated one, when I felt the instant that millimeter opened between my inner terror and impassivity.

And once we identified that moment, Elliott and I began to inventory certain scenes in which I’d failed to feel anything: I spying Naomi’s upturned face, her absorbed expression, when we first kissed in her car.

Me lying atop Kepplemen, on his bed, his head locked in my arms, his foot trying to hook mine, our feet pointed toward his headboard;

him kicking the pillows clear, me staring at the cover of the magazine, of the picture of the two wrestlers, until Kepplemen and I finally lay still.

Only decades after these last sessions with my therapist would I fully comprehend what Kepplemen had done to me—and to my friends and teammates;

only in middle age would I identify the source of the fury I felt when, deep beneath my school, I’d clasp that man and make him feel it—would make him pay for his pleasure with pain.

Here, nearer to where the subways rumbled, to the network of pipelines into which the city’s catch basins fed, I was taught the indelible lesson that, to arrive at love, I must suffer through someone else’s idea of it.

And yet even now, I resist the notion that we are reducible to our wounds.

But that night, after leaving Amanda and her mother at the hospital, I remained my ciphered self.

I walked to Broadway and caught the bus home in something close to shock. I recall, as I deposited change in the fare box, the driver eyeing my blood-blackened hands with a wariness verging on alarm.

Other than a couple of passengers sitting near the front—who, to also ignore the threat I might pose, studied our southbound progress—the bus was nearly empty. At that hour, the streets were mostly empty too.

In something close to a daze, I took a seat in the back, watching the avenue unspool against the windows.

I recall how voided I was, how stunned and emptied—sometimes it seemed I struggled to feel anything at all.

By the time I got back to our apartment, it was very late. I went straight to the kitchen and washed my hands with dish soap, then scraped the blood from beneath my fingernails with a paring knife.

I turned off the TV in my parents’ bedroom; Mom was asleep while the national anthem played over the image of the flag.

As I undressed in my own room, I noted that Oren was gone again, his bunk so neatly made it appeared as if it hadn’t been slept in all summer.

I stared at the ceiling’s blank screen, replaying those same lambent images: Amanda’s smile as she lay back on her bed, propped on her elbows;

her knees swaying against mine; the down above her top lip, soft as sea anemone. And the shame that follows hard on all timidity, that pursues missed opportunity.

Call at 30 Rock was seven a.m., and waking early once again I could hear the TV in my parents’ room—soft music, voices.

The sun was just about to rise.

Mom’s door was cracked, so I knocked and entered.

She was showered and dressed, her legs stretched on the bed, several tissues bunched in her fist.

I lay down next to her and placed my head on her shoulder.

Prince Charles and Prince Andrew, in full military uniform, were just entering Saint Paul’s Cathedral and shaking hands with the bishops.

The organ boomed.

Charles was the more weasel-faced of the pair, Andrew more gopher-cheeked and beaver-toothed than his brother.

A gilded stagecoach, carrying Diana, was seen moving through London’s streets.

And we await the moment, said the male newscaster, when this glass coach, which we can see without periscopes, comes to a stop…

the door opens, and for the first time we see in all its glory that dress.

Diana exited the fairy-tale vehicle with her whale-length train extended behind her.

Two bridesmaids tended to its ends as she proceeded up the steps.

The woman announcer said, What a dream she looks…a bride any man would be happy to see coming down the aisle toward him.

The dress is made of yards of ivory pure silk taffeta, it has big sleeves with deep lace flounces at the elbow.

It has a very, very long train, and if you asked a little girl to draw a princess, I think she’d draw a dress just like that.

I wondered if Amanda and Miss West, in a room at the hospital, were watching this together.

When I asked Mom why she was crying, she replied, “Because it’s all so lovely. Because Diana’s so young and so beautiful. And it makes me think about my wedding.”

“Your wedding makes you sad?”

“Just the time that’s passed,” Mom said.

She occasionally spoke in mysteries like this, but it was too early to interrogate her about this one.

She loudly sighed and laughed at herself, pressing both index fingers to her lower lids.

“Off to torture my ladies,” she said.

Then: “You and I have an appointment with Elliott this evening, at six.”

I got up the nerve to call Amanda before lunch, from my dressing room, and she answered. On the phone she was cordial, relieved. Everything was okay, she explained.

Amazingly, her mother had done no major damage to her hand, it was a one-in-a-million injury not to have harmed any tendons or bones or arteries or nerves. All she’d needed was a tetanus shot and stitches, but she’d lose her grip strength for a few weeks. It was just very sore and wrapped in so many layers of gauze it looked like a Muppet, she said. Amanda was running around taking care of her, she had to pick up her antibiotics at the pharmacy. Could she call me later? she asked. Her rushed brightness felt like a stiff arm. Of course, I said. And she hung up.

My mood darkened, and for the rest of the day I was distracted on set.

I regularly blew my lines, so that even Andy, who was usually forbearing, lost his patience with me.

I brought no energy to my battle with archvillain Microwave Mike, and when I did, I got the choreography wrong and accidentally punched him in the mouth.

When Alison, at day’s end, noticed how taciturn I was, she asked, with real interest, “How’d your date go?” to which I replied, “It was a disaster.” “Well,” she said encouragingly, “I thought you looked very handsome.” And in a moment of thoughtlessness that I regret to this day, I said, “Not handsome enough.” Which she took as a dig and nodded, as if I’d just confirmed some personal truth about helping people, and for the remainder of my time on the show, she never spoke to me again.

When I arrived at Elliott’s office I was in something close to despair.

I had never been to Elliott’s during Mom’s midweek appointment, and every seat was taken in the waiting room. Standing between two chairs, I leaned down to ask Mom about this, and she said, “It’s almost August.” When I looked at her uncomprehendingly, she pulled me by the sleeve to whisper, “All the therapists go on vacation for the month. So everyone’s stuffing their cheeks with insight.”

When her session ended, Elliott appeared at his door, bleary and baggy-eyed. He seemed stooped and distracted, and when he spotted me, he paused, confused, as if he didn’t recognize who I was. For the first time in my life, I thought he looked old.

“Take a seat,” he said. He wrote some notes on his legal pad, then removed his readers and placed them in his breast pocket. He checked his watch. “I give you fifteen minutes,” he said, “you give me your world.”

It was to be, then, one of those hurry-up sessions, tacked on to Mom’s appointment, which Elliott occasionally did with Oren and me after Dad’s Saturday sessions. It was one of those instances when I was reminded that even though Elliott was my father’s best friend, or seemed to be; even though we were treated like special guests at all his parties, we were still customers of his attention, a fact I mostly did not reflect upon but, at that moment, decided somehow cheapened the advice and the fellowship, making both suspect. I wondered, as he rubbed his eyes before closing the door—this with an expression close to impatience—if he ever got sick of us, of everything we transferred upon him for failing to fix.

Instead of telling him about my evening with Amanda, I stuck to the surface, to work and its exasperations. To today’s fuckups and my enduring outlier, outcast status. To my lost summer.

Elliott was twiddling his thumbs.

“Am I boring you?” I asked. My anger shocked me.

Elliott stopped and chuckled. Then he shrugged. “You’re talking about this like a ten-year-old,” he said. He raised his voice several octaves: “Why me, boohoo.” From his jacket’s breast pocket, he removed his handkerchief and blew his nose. “Question: What do you like about acting?”

“I don’t…” I said. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“About the process. The art of it. Does it jazz you? Do you have limitless energy for it? When you worked with Alan Hornbeam this spring, did you want to get to the beauty and truth of each scene? Or were you just watching the clock?”

“I’m not…” I said. “I don’t understand.”

“Why do you even do it?”

“Because I’m…good at it?”

“I asked you. ”

I slumped against the chairback and looked at his frog, which was either staring at the ceiling or giving me the side-eye, it was hard to tell. “Don’t I have to?”

“Do you?” Elliott asked.

“Can we go for a walk?”

“Not today, kid, sorry.”

“I want an egg cream.”

“And I,” Elliott said with a heaviness I would later come to understand, “want more time.”

I crossed my arms. “Can I at least get a hint?”

“Young man,” he said, “your father’s got a voice from God. Your mother moves like an angel. You can breathe life into characters. Be that as it may, just because you have a talent doesn’t mean you have to use it.”

From the side table between us, he slid open its drawer and removed a small, wrapped box, which he placed on the desk.

“Go on,” Elliott said, “open it.”

It was a Space Pen.

“You’ve been eyeballing mine for so long I thought I’d get you your own. Give what I said a think and we’ll discuss in September.” Elliott unfolded his glasses, checked his watch, nodded toward the waiting room. “Now, off with you,” he said. “I got fires to put out.”

Mom wasn’t in the waiting room, so I left the office, figuring she was on the street. I emerged from the office’s long hallway into the city’s noise and evening’s falling brightness to spy my mother talking to Naomi.

They stood by Naomi’s Mercedes. She’d lucked into miraculous parking right out front. They were speaking animatedly, loudly, the sort of catchup that involved the touching of arms, a covering of mouths, laughter that vied with traffic noise, that reminded you how rarely you heard pedestrians in Manhattan talking.

As my mother gestured, Naomi spotted me, and in that glance’s microsecond we were alone. I had not spoken with her since we’d said goodbye that January.

She wore a summer suit made of white linen and was very tan. The spray of freckles dotting her nose and cheeks were darkened beneath her blue-tinted lenses.

I felt a complicated relief, a need to collapse into her arms and tell her everything along with an imperative to pretend we were only family friends, when she did something unexpected.

She reached out to me, snapping her fingers before I was within her grasp so imperiously it made me weak-kneed, and then she pulled me close.

“Look at Mr. Muscles here,” Naomi said, and made a great show of giving me a side hug, her eyes exaggeratedly widening at Mom as she patted my chest.

“Six months, I don’t see him,” she said, “he’s like a grown man already.” And then, out of my mother’s view, she slid her hand from my side to secretly run her fingernails up and down the small of my back. She asked what I was up to, how it was going with The Nuclear Family, poor baby locked inside all summer, Daddy’s gone, where’s your brother? The torrent of questions while her nails traced my spine had rendered me mute. They were a kind of cover, this peppering. My mouth went dry. I stiffened so instantaneously it was like a beak trying to break through my jean’s denim. I was embarrassed and paralyzed with desire. She said to Mom, “You should all come out to my brother’s beach house sometime, what with Shel on the road, and just relax. ” And here, as if for emphasis, she pressed her nails so hard against my shirt they nearly pierced my skin.

“We might just take you up on that,” Mom said.

Naomi checked her watch. “I’m late for my session,” she said, and released me to kiss Mom’s cheek with a loud pop. “Don’t be a stranger,” she ordered.

She turned to kiss me as well, allowing her lips to touch the corner of my mouth, and had I not been so stunned, had my mother not been present, I’d have kissed her back, right there.

She waved to me with a tiny flap of her hand and said, “ Bye, Griffin.” And she hurried into Elliott’s office.

“That woman,” Mom said, the minute we were out of earshot, “is too much.”

In bed that night, all thoughts of Amanda were blown from my mind.

Instead, I was standing with Naomi on the street.

With a heat that, even now, has been undiminished by decades, the scene replayed—she asks me questions, but the sound of her voice is muffled and far away; I am at once light and heavy, buoyant and weighed down.

I had at my disposal no subsequent scenes by which this fantasy might have played out.

And because I was virginal in every way, because I could not imagine its fruition, I was trapped in it.

That was its power.

To this day, I can conjure it, but there are times when it seems to conjure me, so that I wonder if it is Naomi’s doing, her passing thought, some arcane aspect of our connection, current traveling down memory’s hot wire to arc across space and time.

I confess I live in fear of seeing her.

She could be decrepit, and I am certain that, in my presence, her youth and my desire would be restored.

But that night, in my bed, I could summon no release.

I flipped onto my stomach, burying my face in my pillow.

With all my strength I gripped the bunk’s rails and pressed the balls of my feet to the frame, pinning myself to my mattress, because this exertion was my only relief.

—

On Friday, Oren, Mom, and I took the Amtrak to Philadelphia, to stay with Dad and see Sam and Sara in preview—our first glimpse of the musical front to back and out of rehearsal.

The Forrest Theatre was a historic building fashioned of white limestone.

Its interior’s hues were a combination of peach and turquoise, its colossal chandelier, inset beneath its ornate, domed ceiling, loomed so massively I imagined it falling on the unwitting spectators.

After checking into the hotel, we hurried to briefly meet Dad in his dressing room beforehand to wish him luck.

His costume was a tweed jacket and khakis.

He wore a white button-down shirt, a red-and-blue varsity scarf knotted at his throat.

His hair was sprayed blond.

A prop pennant leaned against his vanity mirror.

He looked like he was headed to a college football game.

In the glance Oren and I shot each other, it wasn’t clear which we thought was funnier: Dad’s golden locks or the fact that he couldn’t tell an offensive tackle from a fullback.

He was harried, happy, nervous, and preening, as he paced the small room.

I forgot sometimes how much heavier stage makeup was than for television.

His brightened face seemed to float, as if attached to his skull by a slightly loose spring.

When Mom kissed him in parting, his foundation left a flesh-toned brushstroke on her cheek.

The show was about a pair of couples who are good friends and know each other over the course of their entire lives: Sara, who is engaged to Vern, an aspiring architect—played by Dad; and Sam, who is engaged to Ana.

When the show begins, all four college seniors are celebrating homecoming weekend. The afternoon before the big game, the betrothed couples are introduced at a fraternity party, and the opening ensemble number is a nostalgic one entitled “Have You Declared?” Everyone is sharing their plans, how they’ll go from being economics majors to bankers, from biology majors to scientists, from single to married to families of four or six. But then Sam and Sara see each other across the room; the stage briefly goes dark, until the pair is cordoned off from each other but also privately entangled in their respective spotlights. It’s obvious that they have fallen in love, and the show’s entire conflict centers on whether they will leave their respective spouses in order to be together.

The music’s tempo changes from fast to slow, and they sing only of the moment, of their feelings, of the present, which clouds their future, casting it and them in doubt.

“Too clever by half,” Mom said to me, clapping when it concluded, the applause neither muted nor overwhelming.

The performance’s energy—that invisible cord connecting the actors to the audience—was perhaps partially diffused by the size of the crowd, which filled maybe half the house.

Still, I trusted Mom to name what I could not put my finger on, which made both Oren and me fidgety, inattentive, which I now recognize as a quality the musical lacked, an absence at its very core that manifested as an inability, from its start, to enchant.

“Do I have to watch this whole thing?” Oren whispered.

“Yes,” Mom said.

“Do I have to wear this tie all night?”

“You will sit in your seat and keep on your dress clothes,” Mom said.

What I recall was hoping things might change as the musical progressed. I remember rooting for it and for my father. There was a fantastic quartet number called “Alone at Last” that takes place on the couples’ honeymoon. Sam and Ana are in Italy while Vern and Sara are in Paris, Sam and Sara singing to each other while Vern and Ana swoon over their new spouses—a showstopper. Yet even at that moment, I recognized that the song somehow stood too far above the others. Like all tour de force performances, it strangely threatened to destabilize the whole by setting the rest of the musical’s inferiority in stark relief. After its final, long-held note, which Vern and Ana hold together, there was a pause and then applause, nearer to an eruption, the cheering that followed pegged at an entirely different volume: sustained, and briefly contracting, and then expanding to swell once more, a murmuration that filled the theater with love and Oren, Mom, and me—at least I felt it—with hope.

The actress who played Sam’s wife, Ana, was a tall woman, full-figured and forceful, and she possessed a sort of raspy vividness.

But it was only well after the curtain calls, when we met Dad again backstage, in the narrow hallway his dressing room gave onto, in the hubbub of the actors changing and milling about, greeting guests and fans—only when she exited her dressing room, having removed her blond wig and makeup, that I realized she was the same woman I’d seen my father talking to that day, many months ago, on the Upper West Side, seated on the statue in Columbus Circle.

The woman he’d lied to me about, whose face I’d picked out on his wall of headshots.

She hesitated at her dressing room door, seeing that we blocked her path.

Dad seemed to sense her presence and, looking over his shoulder, said far too loudly, “Katie.” In response to his summons, she gave him a hot look, one close to annoyance—she was like an unwilling audience member being called up onstage—and then reluctantly approached.

It was this reluctance, so quickly discarded, so rapidly exchanged for a kind of enthusiasm, that distinguished her from my mother, that marked her as my mother’s diametrical opposite, and therefore presented an enormous threat.

Her earrings were large and hooped; her fingers beringed, their metals thick and heavy; the pendant arrow on her necklace pointed toward her big boobs.

As if all three adults—my father, my mother, and the woman—were suddenly as translucent as jellyfish, I imagined I spied my father’s increased heart rate, which he tried to cloak in noise; Mom’s lungs shrank as she slowly emptied them of all breath; the woman’s blood vessels narrowed so that their currents quickened. Katie, her dark eyes no longer accusatory, allowed her features to soften and, reaching a hand out to my mother, said, “Lily, it’s so nice to meet you.” To which Mom said only, “You too.” And when they shook hands, Oren looked at Mom, whose silent wrath was both familiar and terrible, and then at me with a baffled expression.

Dad, no matter how hard I wished him to shut up, pressed forward. “Katie,” he said to Mom, “was in the chorus of The Fisher King. ”

Katie nodded at Dad and then at Mom. “I was,” she said, as if my mother hadn’t heard him.

In response to which Mom smiled drily and then turned to Dad as if to ask, Are we done here? But instead of taking the cue, he said to Katie, “And these are my sons,” to which Oren, in a Hail Mary attempt to spring us, asked, “Can we get a cheesesteak?”

“I think everything’s closed,” Dad said, and laughed.

“Jim’s South St.’s open till midnight,” Oren said.

To which Dad, clearly pissed, smiled and said to Katie, “Good to see you,” as if she were filling in as tonight’s lead and then leaving the country.

Mom walked ahead of us as we departed the theater. She got in the cab first, after Dad hailed it. She said nothing after Oren asked again about the food and Dad, seated by the other door, barked at him, “Don’t even start!” Oren and I sat mute. When we arrived at the hotel, Mom announced, “I’m going to the bar.” And when Dad said, “I’ll join you,” she replied, “You’ll put the kids to bed.” Her presence was magically and invisibly in the room while the three of us changed into our pajamas and took turns brushing our teeth, its specter commanding us to not utter a word to each other while we lay in our beds. When she returned to our darkened room an hour later—I pretended to be asleep—I saw her enter the bathroom dressed, her reflection framed in the hall’s mirror, and then emerge in her nightgown before snapping off the light. I could feel her somehow nearer to Oren and me in our bed than she was to our father in the one adjacent.

Dad said, “Can we not do this please?”

For a long time, the only sound in the room was the air conditioner.

“Lily?”

When she still did not respond, Dad said to her, as if none of this night had happened, “What do you think of the changes?” she replied, “It doesn’t seem to me like anything’s changed.”