Playworld

Video Killed the Radio Star

When I recall how I spent that August, it is no surprise to me that I took refuge in the most surprising place of all, one I had never bothered to make my own over the past four summers but now went so far as to decorate: my dressing room.

It was nearly as big as the bedroom Oren and I shared.

It too had a bunk bed, the top and bottom with oval-shaped entrances that gave them a cozy, alcove feel.

Parallel to this, and like our apartment’s dining room, there ran a wall-length set of mirrors, but with vanity bulbs.

Beneath these, like my closet study, and also stretching its length, was a floating desk.

Beneath this, a minifridge, stocked for guests (I had only two that month), with a whole assortment of sodas, snacks, and skim milk for my cereals, the boxes arrayed on the desk above.

I had my own bathroom with a shower.

A TV, suspended in the corner, above the fridge, with access to the major networks, and a live feed from The Nuclear Family ’s taping sessions that I sometimes liked to watch, sound off.

The best part: no windows.

Along with my bunk bed, it gave the room a submarine feel, which I relished.

It also had air-conditioning, which was a relief from August’s unrelenting, kiln-hot temperatures, an all-out assault comprising sunlight that reflected off car windows so brightly I had to squint and heat that radiated from the tarred cracks so softened in places it stuck to the soles of my sneakers.

This swelter was coupled with humidity so high it made any breeze feel more like a blast from a hand dryer and, rather than eradicate the city’s smells, only intensified them.

Traffic and the uncurbed dog shit and the refuse in the wire trash bins through which this fruited air passed.

The stink rising from the subway’s grates after mixing with the tea-brown puddles that never seemed to evaporate along the tracks—a steeped, rusty mixture of rail soot and grime that the cars’ blue flash ionized into a gas and, taken together, only existed at summer’s end in New York, when the season seemed endless; and relief, which fall promised, also meant the beginning of school.

“If I had a place like this,”

Oren said, “I’d never leave.”

He was one of my dressing room visitors. He did not come by often—maybe three times that month. Things had not been the same between us since he told me how I’d deserted him the night of the fire. If my recollections, which were so vivid, could be so suddenly altered, who was I? What had happened? I apologized to Oren on his first visit. I confessed that no matter how hard I tried I couldn’t remember doing what he’d accused me of, and in response he said, with some exhaustion, something so wise it was on par with one of Elliott’s aphorisms: “Let’s chalk it up to childhood.”

It was for him I’d stocked the room with food; when he’d showed up that first time, he mentioned he was hungry, but when I offered to take him to the commissary, he declined, he had to get back to work—which I incorrectly assumed was still at Popeyes.

After that, I was sure to have his favorites: Streit’s matzo, which he liked to eat with margarine, as well as Flower brand Moroccan sardines, the ones in tomato sauce, plus Oscar Mayer bologna—my most famous commercial—with Kraft singles, which Oren rolled into tubes.

He’d been living with Matt, he told me when I asked, at Matt’s father’s place in the Beresford.

It was great, he explained.

He was a record producer and spent his weekdays in Los Angeles and Nashville, so they had the run of the apartment. “Speaking of,”

Oren said, sounding like Dad, “I love what you’ve done with the place.”

He meant the maps of dungeons and castles for Griffynweld I’d taped to my walls, the monsters I’d drawn (a mind flayer, a manticore, a harpy, a golem, a griffin), my manuals and dice stacked next to my unread pile of summer reading books. I urged him not to look too closely. It would spoil the surprise. We’d be playing together in September, when Dad finally got home.

“You mean ‘if,’?”

Oren said.

I didn’t want to think about it.

“You speak to him?” he asked.

“He calls me here sometimes, before curtain.”

“Where is he now?”

“D.C.”

“What about Mom?”

The Monday morning after my weekend at Amanda’s, before I’d headed to work, Mom had called me into her room. A mostly packed suitcase lay on her bed. “I’m taking the train this afternoon to Virginia, to spend some time with my parents,”

she explained as she folded some remaining clothes. “Most of my ladies are on holiday anyway,”

she said, referring to her clients. Dad’s show had just begun previews at the Kennedy Center, so I asked Mom if she was going there to be nearer to him. She shook her head. “I’m going there to be nearer to myself,”

she said, clicking the suitcase’s clasps. I understood what she meant and I didn’t. She beat me to my next question.

“The Shahs have agreed to let you stay with them while I’m away.”

I blinked at this several times; it was all the reaction I could muster. “But they live in Great Neck.”

“They commute,” Mom said.

“What about Oren?”

“He’s staying at Matt’s.”

“How long will you be gone?”

“A week,”

Mom said. “Maybe longer.”

“Are you and Dad getting a divorce?”

“We haven’t talked about it.”

“Does he know you’re leaving?”

“We haven’t talked about that either.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You will when you get older.”

“Why do adults always say that?”

I asked. “It makes me never want to grow up.”

“That’s fair,” Mom said.

“It’s not.”

“No,”

Mom said, “none of this is fair.”

She reached her arms out to me and we hugged.

I had grown much taller than her, though she only seemed smaller when we weren’t touching.

Her temple rested on my chest. She was the most physical with me when she was in pain.

“Naomi is very fond of you,”

Mom said. “You’ll be in good hands.”

—

Naomi’s hands.

I slept in the Shahs’ guest room, the only bedroom on their house’s first floor.

Over those next several weeks, after everyone had gone to sleep, after Naomi slipped through my door and padded across the carpet, she would grope my blanket in the pitch-dark, patting down my outline like a child feeling for a parent after a bad dream.

Her slip’s sheer fabric, once she’d tented the sheets above us, sometimes generated static electricity, and her body, so blued by dark as to be invisible, seemed briefly strung with heat lightning, which crackled.

Her laughter, now that she lay atop me, was throaty, wicked, pleased.

She liked to clasp my chin between her thumb and index finger when she began to kiss me, as if to assert that I was hers now, that there was no getting away, and in those initial weeks, I did not want to.

I wanted to exercise my new powers, spread my wings.

I thought about the first thing Kepplemen had taught us about wrestling: Where the head goes, the body will follow.

So I moved Naomi around, I reversed our positions.

I flipped her over to claw the back of her neck.

She loved when I did this, she was encouraging as we proceeded.

She gave me directions, she spoke as if she were teaching me to drive: go slow, speed up, go easy, go fast.

It felt wicked, before and during—this velocity—though afterward it made me terribly sad.

The Shahs lived in the Saddle Rock neighborhood of Great Neck, just a few blocks from Little Neck Bay. Their home—two stories tall and designed like a giant H—was on Melville Lane, between Byron and Shelley, a cosmic joke I wouldn’t understand for years. Their foyer, its floor laid with great slabs of black-and-white marble, was dominated by a wide set of twin stairs whose strands, after ascending, met again at a long hallway—the letter’s crossbar. If you made a left, you arrived at the family wing. On the top of this stem, the west-facing side, was the Shahs’ master bedroom, which I visited only once during my stay.

Danny and Jackie, on the first afternoon after I arrived, gave me the tour.

The master, which I’d been in that past winter but had not seen in the light (I’d walked through it in a daze, after my wrestling tournament, on the night I was concussed, before Naomi led me to the shower), was made bright by three large windows, which the Shahs’ California king waterbed faced, this second-floor height affording a view, over their yard’s high hedges, of Little Neck Bay.

Above the headboard was a recessed section of wall, top-lit, its lower edge serving as a shelf.

There were several books here: a pair of leather-bound copies of the Quran as well as a multivolume set of the Hadith, whose gilded spines, taken together, formed embossed letters in Arabic.

Above these volumes hung a calligraphic painting, the symbol of Allah—I recognized all these from my days at Al and Neal’s apartment—beneath which there rested an ancient saber in an ornamented scabbard, balanced on the alabaster cast of a woman’s long-fingered hand.

“We’re not allowed to touch the sword,”

Danny said, as if she’d read my mind.

She led us to her room at the stem’s middle. It was decorated, paint to linens, in various shades of pink, every item exhibiting the same sheer femininity as a dancer’s tutu.

A framed Degas, one of his soft-focus, seen-from-the-wings dancers, stood above the dresser.

Her large window’s sill was arrayed with a menagerie of Baby Alive dolls.

A collage of Fashion Plates designs, all of which were of women in variously patterned leg warmers, covered the bulletin board above her desk.

Her bedroom was connected to her sister’s bedroom by what she called “our Jackie and Jill bathroom,”

a phrase she’d clearly heard from her father, since her tone had the same cutesy inflection he liked to use with them.

Jackie’s room (“Follow me, please,”

she said, taking over the tour) was for the most part the twin of her sister’s—the same color scheme, the same puffy pink polka-dotted bedspread.

Above her dresser were three sets of women’s pointe shoes, one toe of each autographed: Darci Kistler, Kyra Nichols, and—in a fine hand that I’d seen in the margins of The Age of Innocence and The House of Mirth as I searched for Dad’s stash of cash—Lily Hurt, my mother.

A pair of framed posters hung above Jackie’s headboard, both of Baryshnikov.

In the first, that famous shot by Max Waldman, Misha is shirtless, his torso chiseled, his foot extended well above his ear— développé en l’air, as Mom would say—the picture snapped mid-leap, his right hand touching his pointed toe, the other arm outstretched while his head is flung back.

In the second, by Richard Avedon, he is naked and so stirringly virile that when Jackie caught my eye after staring at it, I realized for the first time how closely she resembled her mother.

My room, downstairs on the H’s opposite stem, was somewhere between a maid’s room and a study.

It had its own bathroom and a window that faced the driveway.

Two full beds were arranged against this same wall, and between them was a small desk.

Above it, a quartet of individually framed photographs of trucks decorated with rainbow-bright designs and friezes—Pakistani folk art, I would later learn, that adorns its country’s buses.

There was a more formal guest room upstairs, above the garage, but I quickly came to understand my room had been picked by Naomi because it was the diagonally farthest from the master.

You had to first pass through the dining room, whose collection of china sat on a pair of decorative shelves and tinkled loudly when you walked through it.

From the dining room, a swinging door opened onto the kitchen—this in the middle of the stem—which, if you made a right once you’d passed through it, led to what Jackie called the Blue Room, because its walls were painted a deep, lacquered navy: a sitting room of sorts, formal and clearly never used, with the door to my room opening onto it.

If you turned around and continued through the kitchen, again headed toward the house’s bay side, you stepped down into a glass-enclosed sunroom with a tulip table at its center surrounded by four chairs.

The slate floors were outfitted with radiant heating—an unimaginable technological luxury back then—which the Shahs kept turned to high during the summer because they cranked their air-conditioner morning to night.

The sunroom looked out on the well-manicured backyard and a water feature, a large koi pond, whose filter made a pleasant burble.

My only chore for those three weeks that I lived with them was to feed these fish in the evening.

They ate pellets that smelled like dried cat food, and when I so much as passed my palm above their pool, the fish coalesced into a single being, a mythological creature, many-mouthed, and their lips, when I lowered my cupped hand amid their massed bodies, were mobile and delicate, sucking and kissing away their meal.

Their tenderness always brought a smile to my face, as it did to Naomi’s, whom I often spied watching me from the living room’s floor-to-ceiling windows—this room behind the staircase, where the TV lived, and where the family spent most of its time together.

She’d check over her shoulder to see if Sam was nearby, and if he wasn’t paying attention—he, in profile, was usually glued to the news—she gave me a secret wave.

On the mornings when I was shooting and had to be in the city early, it was Sam who drove me. “Pick,”

he’d say, gesturing toward the Bentley and the Ferrari as the garage door clattered open. I always chose the Ferrari—the 365 GT, that gorgeous bullet of a vehicle and one I became very familiar with during those several weeks. Sam relished this crack-of-dawn opportunity to “peel,”

as he liked to say (it was also the word on his custom license plate). It offered him the excuse to leave for work even earlier than he would normally and thereby enjoy what he called his “freshest hours,”

when he was the only person in the office and could, as he liked to brag, “get more done before nine a.m. than anyone else before lunch.”

He said this often, clearly pleased with what he considered such a felicitously phrased witticism. He always laughed, whether I did or not. I, a decent mimic, would practice my impression of it if I wanted Naomi to give me some distance, to cool her desire, its sound being so anti-libidinous to her because of its familiarity. It had a lower, more masculine register; it was a dash of spit mixed with a scoop of gravel, and its four notes revved louder with each detonation, injected, as it was, with self-satisfaction: Hew, went Sam, hew hew hew.

The hour’s lighter traffic gave him license to speed, and we touched some Autobahn numbers on those morning commutes, which made me laugh as one does on roller coasters or during near-death experiences.

And yet my response was equal parts giddiness, because Sam was so clearly expert at the wheel.

He saw seams in the Long Island Expressway’s ever-shifting lanes that conferred the sense that we were on an invisible, zigzagging lane, newly paved just for us.

During these drives, as I chuckled instead of screamed, I saw—as I had during my weekend with Amanda, and now, during my night visits with Naomi—that part of the nature of my character was to blur into background, to camouflage myself, to cuttlefish in order to hide.

And in my newfound state, I found it repulsive, I wished to molt it from my person.

I arrived at 30Rock with my pulse thready and heart pounding from the ride; I slipped toward sleep, after Naomi left my bed late that night, in the exact same state; in both instances, I suffered self-loathing.

I was riding two waves, abdicating agency because of circumstance, and I decided I needed to change this about myself as soon as possible.

Or at least talk to Elliott about it upon his return from vacation.

Assuming, of course, I didn’t get myself murdered by Sam in the meantime.

During these high-octane performances of Sam’s—which was exactly what they were—he enjoyed talking about the Ferrari’s handling. Its hood was disproportionately lengthy to accommodate its massive V12; its fender was wedge-shaped, with hideaway headlights that, when collapsed, maintained its sharp lines. The Ferrari’s appearance was more sedan than a sportscar, but there was something unmistakably ferocious about its makeup, something mako-like in its slipstreaming capacity to torpedo down the road. The interior was James Bond classy, its walnut dash full of unmarked black switches, one of which, on my most paranoid days, I feared Sam might flip and eject me through the roof. “Listen,”

Sam said as he drove, and cupped a hand to his ear, “to the induction noise. You feel that steady rev? That is the V12’s effortlessness. Here we are in third gear, and you wouldn’t know we were about to touch ninety miles an hour. Because that is where the car wants to cruise. It makes you forget speed limits. It makes you want to break the law.”

I knew Sam was showing off. I also knew he was thrilled to have another man around. Given that he lived in a house full of women, I was important to him. My audience, given that he was his company’s owner and boss, also made me, in his estimation, less of a yes man than a test case. I also knew I possessed qualities that he did not and was envious of, jacked up as I was from my summer workouts, my body pheromone-flooded, my dalliances with his wife signaling, precognitively, my alpha status. It was to my great surprise, during these drives, that I discovered how insecure he was about what he perceived to be his deficits. That in spite of his money, clothes, and cars, he suspected he was…uncool. What he wanted, then, was my approval.

So he overcompensated. That first week, during what must have been only our second drive together, a terrible accident near Flushing Meadows forced us to detour onto Grand Central Parkway and to then swing north to the Triborough Bridge. When we crossed the Harlem River, we found traffic snarled on the FDR—a ripple effect of all the rerouted volume. “Shortcut,”

Sam said, and yanked us onto the 116th Street exit in East Harlem, seemingly deserted at this early hour. At the very first red light, we were beset on both sides by squeegee men. “No, no!”

Sam shouted, and knuckled his window several times. “No, thank you!”

But they’d already soaped down the windshield and raised the wipers. Through the suds, the now-green light dripped like wet paint until it was S ’d back into its solid state by the squeegees’ rubber. “Motherfucker,”

Sam said, reaching over my knees to open the glove box, revealing the silver bulk of a .44 Magnum, a weapon I knew from the Dirty Harry movies. He threw open the car door and stepped out into the lane. He brandished the pistol and then shouted, “I said, ‘No, thank you!’?”

as the two men, sprinting, shrank into the distance. Sam watched them for a moment, then pincered the abandoned sponge from the hood and dropped it onto the pavement. He kicked the tipped-over bucket out of the Ferrari’s path and got back in the car.

“These people,”

Sam said, replacing the pistol in the glove box, “are ruining this country.”

He dropped the car into first and gunned the engine. “Nixon at least was willing to say it. Reagan, not so much.”

Our current president loomed large during my first week with the Shahs. When Naomi and I arrived home that Thursday evening with Danny and Jackie in tow, Sam greeted us at the front door holding a sweating magnum of Dom Pérignon. “Hurry,”

he said, “or else you’ll miss it.”

He led us to the living room and, while he fiddled with the bottle’s cage, indicated we should watch the television. There was Reagan, seated at table outside his home in Rancho del Cielo. Beneath a denim jacket, he wore a white shirt with a western collar, jeans, of course, and cowboy boots. It was so misty you could barely make out the press corps gathered around him. Whether it’s the fog itself or the fidelity of the camera, everything looks like a dream, the vapors are so thick there is a soft-focus quality to every image. President Reagan, said the anchor, offered remarks before signing the Kemp-Roth legislation into law.

“I can’t speak too highly of the leadership, the Republican leadership in the Congress, and those Democrats who so courageously joined in and made both of these truly bipartisan programs. But I think in reality the real credit goes to the people of the United States, who finally made it plain that they wanted a change and made it clear in Congress and spoke with a more authoritative voice than some of the special interest groups that they wanted these changes in government. This represents a hundred and thirty billion dollars in savings over the next three years. This represents seven hundred and fifty billion dollars in tax cuts over the next five years. And this is only the beginning.”

With great fanfare, Sam produced the sword that usually rested above his bed, ran its blade up and down the bottle’s neck three times, and then, with a quick stroke, sabered it open. A great pop followed. The girls leaped and clapped. Naomi shook her head at me. Sam filled the flutes and handed them out. After raising his glass, he shouted, “To getting rich!”

Jackie said, “I thought we were already rich, Daddy.”

“Well,”

Sam said, “now we’re richer.”

And then he laughed that rich man’s laugh of his. A sound that affirmed what Elliott would say to me later that year: judge people not by how they lose, but how they win.

In the evenings, it was Naomi who almost always drove us, but only on rare occasions immediately. She would pick me up in front of Radio City Music Hall and then make straight for the Dead Street. Though once, in the back seat, after she had buttoned her blouse, she startled me by saying, with a pain in her voice that was close to anger, “It really bothers me that you never ask me to come see you at work!”

I was stunned by this. The thought hadn’t even occurred to me. And when she began to cry, I found I was frightened by this display of emotion.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“ I’m sorry,”

she said, and wiped her eyes, “I just want us to be more than just”—and she swept her hand in front of her—“this.”

I didn’t know what I wanted, but I knew exactly what was being asked of me. So I kissed her gently, then firmly, repeatedly, pecking at her till she started smiling; I tickled her until she stopped crying, till she began to giggle; and after she told me, “Stop,”

and blew her nose, I promised to make it up to her, sweetly. “Come to the studio tomorrow,”

I said, “after lunch.”

I met her in the lobby. I was in my Peter Proton costume—suspenders, pocket protector, capri pants, Einstein wig, gigantic glasses—which Naomi thought was hilarious. I even greeted her in his nerdy voice. “Look at you,”

she said, “all in character and everything.”

I walked her past Sert’s American Progress mural and his smaller frescoes, pointing out the figure I liked best—the titan carrying the gigantic branch, straddling the ceiling columns, with the bomber squadrons in the background, sailing through the clouds—as if I owned the paintings, as if this were my living room. When we approached the security guard’s podium, before the elevator bank, I showed him my NBC identification card, which Naomi asked to see as well, examining it over my shoulder while we waited for the next car, clasping her hands in front of her because, I could tell, she was so nervous and excited. “Look at you,”

she said again, and knocked her shoulder to mine, “all official and professional.”

I gave her the entire tour of 8H, starting with a view of the soundstage from the audience’s balcony seats so she could appreciate the space’s vastness. We had to speak very quietly because they were taping—a scene in which our archvillainess, Lady Lava, has trapped my parents beneath her volcano, binding them back-to-back and suspending them above a pool of magma, using them as bait to lure me into her trap. Fog machines pumped white smoke from the pit. “Look at all the wires and stuff hanging from the ceiling,”

Naomi whispered. “How do they know which plug is to which, you wonder?”

I explained to her that the red light flashing atop each video camera meant that it was the feed the director had cut to, that the trickiest part of the boom operator’s job was to get the microphone close enough to the actors to pick up their voices while not dipping it into the shot. When Tom called “cut”

over the speaker, I led Naomi down the hallway to hair and makeup, where Nicole and Freddie were sitting in their respective high chairs, smoking and reading the newspapers.

“Wow,”

Naomi said to Freddie, “salon care for this kid every day. If I had you around, maybe I could get mine under control.”

“Probably not,”

Freddie said, and smiled, which made Naomi laugh, because she didn’t know him.

I took her to costume, showed her the Coneheads suits, the Killer Bees outfits, Belushi’s Samurai hotel kimono, the turquoise tuxedo jacket Bill Murray wore as Nick the Lounge Singer. Naomi fingered the outfits, pulled at an unraveling thread in Father Guido Sarducci’s habit, and tsk-tsked. “That show’s a little too irreverent and racy, if you want my opinion,” she said.

We proceeded to the control room. “Look at this place,”

Naomi gasped, surveying all the buttons atop the panels lit up like Christmas lights and the array of screens. “Tom’s the director,”

I said, and pointed him out to Naomi, “the bearded guy in the Hawaiian shirt.”

He was seated before the monitor wall. Jeff, the video-switcher tech, was to his right. When Tom snapped his fingers and called out, “Camera three, and one, and three, and two,”

I explained how they were cutting between units, that on the three left-hand monitors you could see the cameras’ individual feeds and on the fourth screen the scene in continuity.

“And who are they?”

Naomi asked, indicating the pair at the adjacent console.

“That’s Julie and Jim,”

I said, “the lighting technician and lighting board operator.”

“And what about the girl,”

Naomi asked, “sitting next to the director?”

“Oh,”

I said. “That’s the script assistant.”

And as if I were possessed by my father, my eye twitched. “That’s Liz.”

“Huh,”

said Naomi, and crossed her arms.

Liz looked over her shoulder at me. She smiled her toothy smile and waved. I told Naomi she could watch us shoot my scene from here or the soundstage.

“Doesn’t matter to me,”

she replied, a little coolly.

I decided to take her to my dressing room. Once there, I turned up the TV’s volume and had her sit in my chair.

“Maybe I should get back to the office,” she said.

I took a deep breath. “I’d like it if you stayed,” I said.

“I don’t know what I’m gonna do, we’ll see,”

she said, miffed.

I marched to the set.

The scene took maybe a half hour to shoot.

The entire time, it was as if I could see Naomi’s face in each camera’s lens.

To my relief, she hadn’t left; to my annoyance, she was still there, because it was as if she were my girlfriend.

“Do I get to meet your costars?”

she asked, and so I took her to the soundstage and introduced her to Natalie Forrest, who played Lava Girl, and of course Andy Axelrod, who, after exchanging niceties with Naomi, after singing my praises to the catwalks, caught my eye, nodded toward my guest, and, to my horror, gave me the thumbs-up.

Walking Naomi out, she stopped me. “Ugh, I forgot my purse in your dressing room.”

It was sitting atop my desk, among a scattering of maps and hand-copied tables, next to several pewter figurines that stood in for my friends and for the monsters that surrounded them.

The ceiling monitor beamed the empty set of Lava Girl’s lair.

Naomi said, “Close the door,”

and took a seat on my bed, bouncing a couple of times on the mattress to test its firmness. Then she called me over to her.

“I loved watching you perform,”

she said, and pulled me close, locking her hands behind my legs. “You’ve got great comic timing.”

The compliment made me ashamed. None of this, I thought, required any talent. Even if it did, that wasn’t why she was complimenting me.

“So,”

she said, “was this where you and you-know-who had your little love nest?”

“Who?” I asked.

“Don’t who me. Liz.”

“Oh,”

I said. Oh, I thought, dumbfounded suddenly by Fate’s operations. She’d believed me back then.

In response, I kissed Naomi, because I didn’t want to lie anymore.

“All right, Peter Proton, let’s see those superpowers in action.”

My superpowers.

One of these, I was starting to realize, was detachment.

When Naomi and I were together, it was as if my mind rode a thermal above our bodies, my wingbeats as quiet as my other exertions.

I was tireless because of this levitation and distance, and terrifically lonely, sometimes strangely angry.

And this anger I occasionally took out on her with an endurance whose limit I’d yet to touch and which made her delirious with pleasure.

But more than anything, when we were together, I was baffled —the feeling bordered on defeat—not only because I could not recapture the intensity of our first time but also because the further removed I was in mind and body from her, the more delight Naomi expressed, the closer I brought her to me.

I thought it was supposed to be the opposite.

Was that what had happened with Amanda? Something must be wrong with me, I thought, with my heart, I was certain of it, attracting, as I had, the opposite of what I’d wanted.

“I love how you touch me,”

Naomi whispered afterward. “I love how you just…throw me around.”

On the mornings when I wasn’t shooting, I still came into Manhattan. On these days, it was Naomi who drove me into the city—this after we dropped off Danny and Jackie at their day camp’s bus stop and then returned to the house for what Naomi had begun to call “the pushy”

in a girlish voice that sounded disturbingly like Danny’s. It was an act we always prosecuted in my room, since my side window faced the house’s driveway, with a clear view of Melville Lane. Afterward, we showered separately. The marble floors in my bathroom were always so cold and slick with steam, which also fogged the mirror over the sink. No matter how often I wiped its glass to see myself, I disappeared again. I’d dress for my day. I’d wait at the foot of their entryway’s stairs. Naomi would appear at the landing, freshly made up, and as she descended, gently dinged the railing with her ring.

Naomi and I didn’t speak much during the drive into Manhattan.

What was there to say anymore? Our destination was Sam’s office, a five-story building on Thirty-Fifth Street between Eighth and Ninth.

The company’s name, the only one on the buzzer, was Shah Shirtwaists .

You entered through a short, dimly lit hallway.

On the left was an antique, manually operated birdcage elevator.

Straight ahead was the main office, whose walls were fashioned of exposed brick and divided by black wrought-iron beams.

It was high-ceilinged and had an open floor plan, with the exception of Sam’s glass-enclosed workspace at the very back.

When you entered, there was, to the immediate right, a receptionist’s desk, unmanned, and, to the left, running the length of the entire area, a row of seven desks, each occupied by an older, nattily dressed gentleman—suit, tie, Jew—except for the one at the end and nearest Sam’s office, which was reserved for Naomi, a part-time salesperson at the company.

So far as I could tell, these men spent their entire day on the phone, departing for lunch en masse at twelve on the number, departing at five on same, schlepping past me, at the front desk, in Seven Dwarfs fashion and, before leaving, saying their schlumpy, schmaltzy, kvetchy, kvelly, menschy, schlimazely, alta-kaker-y goodbyes.

Answering the main line and greeting the rare visitor—my desk was perpendicular to the office’s front door—was my job, for which Sam handsomely paid me on a per diem basis, and one I enjoyed more than any acting job in my entire life. It was Naomi who trained me; it was here she’d first been employed by her husband. “You want to learn any business,”

she said, “you start as the company’s receptionist.”

In later life, I’d find this to be true, but I cannot say I learned anything about Sam’s business during my short stint manning the phones, although I did love operating the switchboard, a gray metal contraption with a rotary dial on its left and, on faded, cream-colored tabs, the names and extensions of every employee, these still stamped clearly on my memory.

I cannot say why answering the phone and directing a call or taking a message pleased me so; it was, perhaps, the sheer mindlessness of it, the uncomplicatedness of it, the comparative lack of responsibility.

Or the fact that the office’s volume was never too heavy, my supervision cursory, which allowed me to generate my Griffynweld campaign’s entire spreadsheet of random monster encounters.

Naomi took me to lunch on my first day. She waited until Sam and the salesforce had left and then approached my desk and said, “You hungry?”

When I nodded, she said, “I want to show you something first.”

Instead of leaving, she stepped onto the antique elevator, where I joined her in the car. She closed the accordion cage, which made a great bash, and cranked the deadman’s lever to U . “Next stop,”

Naomi said as we climbed, “fifth floor: towel terry, French terry, terry storage.”

The pulleys groaned, the pistons pffed, the heat rose as we did.

Each floor that sank past was dark but for the ceiling-high, street-facing windows, these covered by papyrus-colored shades whose edges were radiant with sunlight.

Naomi pulled the lever and we stopped with a sound that resembled train couplings colliding.

Naomi opened the gate, and I stepped off the car.

It was dim as a cavemouth and absolutely stifling up here.

My steps on the thick hardwood planks were muffled as they were on the concrete soundstage.

The air was so oppressive, there was so little circulation, it made me want to gasp.

On rows of pallets were stacked enormous rolls of terry cloth, many in disarray, come loose and unspooled.

Some were in mounds piled waist- and shoulder-high; others even taller, so that in the low light they resembled sand dunes.

One spark, I thought, and the building would explode into a fireball.

Naomi took off her suit jacket, removed her shoes, and climbed onto the nearest hillock on her hands and knees.

Then she stood and began to walk atop this rolling landscape, pausing to turn to look at me and then continuing with her arms out to the sides for balance.

She ascended one of the largest piles and then she faced in my direction.

She smiled as she let herself fall, disappearing from sight.

I found her lying in a great impression, arms outstretched and legs spread, laughing to herself.

I too leaped from this precipice to land on my back with a dusty thump, and then she embraced me.

The air was desiccated as a desert, and later, I watched motes through the window’s glowing frames, my shirt soaked through by then, my hair heavy with fibers, my hand in Naomi’s as we stared at the black ceiling.

“Let’s get you fed,”

she offered, pulling me up from this nest’s depression.