—
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 shaped like 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 Buildingit 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 found West on 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 knewfrom the Adlers and Pilchards and Dolinskis, to the Shahs and the Barrs and the Pottses, and then Cliffnotes’s family and mineAmanda’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 faces above 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 coloringshe too was blond, though she wore her hair shortwith 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 in The 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.
“You look nice,” I said.
“So do you.”
“Where’d you get that dress?” Miss West asked her.
“Dad bought it for me.”
“Well,” Miss West said, “there’s a first time for everything.”
The phone rang.
“I’ll get it,” Amanda said.
“Stay where you are,” her mother said, “smell the roses your friend brought me.”
Amanda froze as Miss West strode toward the kitchen.
She smiled at me again but then turned her ear toward the hall.
“Oh,” Miss West said when she answered, a little grumpily, “hello.” A pause.
“You too,” she said.
And then: “She is, in fact, although she’s on her way to a dinner.” When Miss West reappeared, she said to Amanda, “It’s Rob.”
In a flash, Amanda was gone.
The speed with which she hurried to answer hooked something deep in my gullet, dragging it with her.
With Miss West, it registered with some embarrassment and, bless her, some sympathy.
“Ditching her at the last minute,” she said of Rob.
“ Not gentlemanly.” Then: “Not that it stops him.”
From where I stood, I turned to see Amanda lift the receiver from the counter, turn her back to us, and press it to her ear.
At which point I noticed Miss West was standing close behind me.
“You’d think she’d learn,” she said, “with a father like hers, to pick the ones that don’t run.
But the ones who run only teach their kids to chase.
Cigarette?” she offered.
“No thanks,” I said.
“Or,” she muttered, catching fire, “maybe he has a ten-inch cock.”
Before I could even begin to react to this baffling statement, Amanda said, “Should we go?” She was awaiting me in the hall.
“Nice to meet you, Griffin,” Miss West said.
Then, before she closed the door, said to her daughter, “No matter where your dad takes you.
Get the steak.”
After we left the apartment, Amanda and I did not speak.
We remained silent even after we turned north on Broadway.
Amanda kept her arms crossed and her eyes to her shoes, as if by staring them down she might silence her heels against the pavement.
When a passing stranger, seeing us so dressed and, inferring we were a couple, smiled, this only seemed to increase her inwardness.
I was dim but no dummy.
I knew that my presence deepened Amanda’s gloom, that my status as stand-in was a reminder she’d been stood up and burdened our stroll with a feeling of obligation.
I realized my only currency was to provide comfort, and the only coins I had to play were changing the subject, so I asked where we were going.
“To Columbia,” Amanda said.
“My dad’s attending a reading there before we eat.” But then she turned quiet again, and her silence was intolerable.
“What does he do for a living?”
“He’s an English professor,” Amanda said.
“At a boarding school in New Hampshire.”
“Which one?” I asked.
As if I knew any.
“Brewster.”
I felt my lower lip cover my upper one as I nodded.
“What’s the difference between a professor and a teacher?”
“A PhD and an ego,” Amanda said.
I waited.
“What about your mom?”
“She’s a nurse.
At Mount Sinai.
Just a few blocks from here.” She brightened a bit.
“That was sweet of you to get her roses,” she said.
And then, she took my arm in both of hers.
It was the charitableness of it that made it torture; it was the devotion that it so easily summoned in me that made it pleasant.
And once I figured out how to walk normally and be held by her at the same time, I could nod at the passersby and enjoy that, for now, she was mine.
“Speaking of roses,” Amanda said, “she’s going to lash me with them if I don’t bring her home a doggie bag.
Every time I go to dinner with my dad, that’s the rule.”
“My cousins get the belt.
But only if they curse.”
“My mom prefers the back of a hairbrush.”
“My dad likes to lift me by the scruff.
Like a kitten.” I demonstrated on myself, walking on tiptoes, but without moving the arm Amanda held, a marionetting that made her laugh.
“She used to lock my brother and me in the closet for hours, but that was only when we were little.
No wonder he asked the judge if he could live with my father.”
We’d entered Columbia’s gates.
The three long walkways were made of the same hexagonal paving stones as in Central Park.
The paths were tree-lined.
Black iron posts connected by black chains fenced off the greenspace.
It seemed as if we were passing through a tunnel to a different world, or a city hidden within the city, for we now entered a great expanse whose buildings were of an entirely different architecture.
To our right, a long rectangular building was fronted by columns whose facade was engraved with names from my seventh grade class in ancient history: Herodotus, Sophocles, Plato, Aristotle.
To our left, flanked by a pair of wide flights of stairs, was a domed building in front of which a statue of an enthroned woman with open arms was surrounded by students who sat and talked in the spring-softened evening.
I considered this sky, the view of which was unimpeded, its immense breadth somehow even more clearly and discretely framed by these low-slung rooftops.
Someone called out Amanda’s name.
It seemed to come from everywhere.
On the wide steps surrounding the statue, a man and woman stood and, while Amanda and I waited, walked toward us.
Both appeared formally dressedI said a silent word of thanks to Mom and DadAmanda’s father in a bow tie and blue blazer, the woman in a man’s blazer and jeans.
But when they drew close, the woman accompanying Amanda’s father was revealed to be someone nearer our age.
Amanda’s father so identically resembled her he may as well have been her twin.
After kissing Amanda, he introduced us to Tina Debrovner, “my most talented senior.” If Amanda, dressed and made up thus, seemed costumed as the woman she would one day become, Tina already embodied this.
She wore cowboy boots and worn-in bell-bottom jeans, a silver belt buckle with a piece of turquoise at its center, and a brown silk blouse that matched her tweed blazer.
Her makeup was light; her chestnut-colored hair and lashes were long; her green eyes flashed.
Above her top lip, on its right side, was a mole that, for the first time in my life, conferred luster on the term beauty mark .
Her style seemed fully realized; her comfort in her person spoke to everything aspirational in the word “adult.” Her hands were pressed into her blazer’s pockets, and she removed one and held it out to Amanda and then me with the total confidence of an elder and none of the condescension of a superior.
Amanda’s father then reached out a hand to me and introduced himself as Dr.West.
“You must be Rob,” he said.
“Griffin,” I said.
He glanced at Amanda, confused.
“Rob’s at Vassar,” she said, “visiting his sister.”
Dr.West winked at me.
“Visiting co-eds is more like it.” Then, to Amanda, whom he’d clearly rocked, said to her, “But maybe they don’t call them that anymore.” He checked his watch.
“Let’s head to Butler, shall we? I made a reservation.”
We started walking, Amanda and I behind Dr.West and Tina.
To change the subject, I asked, “How was the reading?”
“Wonderful,” Dr.West said.
When I asked who the author was, Tina looked over her shoulder and said, “Shirley Hazzard.
Do you know her? She read from her new novel.”
“The Transit of Venus,” Dr.West said.
“Which, I’ll add, Tina did not like.”
She rolled her eyes.
“I didn’t say I didn’t like it.
I just found its style…dense.”
“More likely you’re too young to understand it.”
“I didn’t think it was beyond my comprehension.
It was a scene,” she explained to Amanda and me, “when a man and a woman go on a first date together in the English countryside, and he tells her a secret.”
“That’s what happens,” Dr.West cut in, “but it isn’t what’s happening.”
“I’m getting to the subtext,” she said, and there was ample warmth in her exasperation.
“What’s happening is that the man is in love with the woman, but the woman has already decided she can never love this man.
That she’ll remain permanently out of his reach and he’ll be permanently reaching toward her, he’ll do anything just to catch a glimpse of her, just like…” She placed her index finger to her chin.
“The planet Venus in transit.
Does that,” she now said to Dr.West, “sound right?”
“It sounds perfect.
Until you get to the end.”
“What I don’t buy,” Tina continued, “is that we have such complete conviction about such things from the word go.”
“That’s because at your age,” Dr.West said, “you still believe you can love things out of people.
Or love them into your life.”
“It’s less a question of belief,” Tina said playfully.
“I just know you’re wrong.”
“So based on the audience of a single chapter, you’re ready to dismiss the work outright?”
“Yes,” she said.
“That sounds to me like complete conviction.
From the word go.”
Tina laughed warmly.
“Touché.”
Dr.West turned to me and said, “Tina is a romantic, while I am a realist.”
“What’s wrong with being a romantic?” she said.
“It tends toward the neurotic.”
“Well, this neurotic finds most realists crotchety.”
“Don’t forget condescending,” Amanda said.
Dr.West, gratified, said, “What about you, Griffin? Realist or romantic?”
Overmatched, I parroted a line that my father loved to use in such situations.
“I just work here,” I said.
Everyone laughed at this.
Even Amanda, whom, I realized, her father had not asked and who, when she smiled appreciatively at my joke, was, I thought, trying to remain romantic, in spite of current evidenceRob’s absence, my presence, and her mom’s ordinanceto the contrary.
Which made me, I realized, feel for her.
In spite of myself.
“Well,” Dr.West said, gesturing toward a building on our left, “here we are.”
From the hallway we walked onto an elevator.
Dr.West pressed the topmost button, and next the doors opened onto the restaurant’s entrance, which read, in gold letters, Terrace in the Sky .
Waiters in black tie hurried between tables with white napkins draped over their arms or cradled bottles of wine or balanced oval trays.
A tiered dessert stand went rolling by.
The hostess led us to our table at the deck’s corner.
Dr.West pulled out Tina’s chair, and I did the same for Amanda.
The sunset had draped its fading pink blanket above the city, and my seat had a view I’d never before enjoyed: the northwestern corner of Central Park, that Sherwood Forest it sometimes seemed Manhattan had been built to enclose, its walkways dimpled by its snow-white globes, just now beginning to shine.
Following Dr.West’s lead again, I snapped open my napkin and laid it on my lap.
Dr.West, looking down his nose, seemed to somehow peruse the menu with his chin.
When the waiter asked for our drink order, Dr.West said, “Ladies?” and Amanda said, “White wine spritzer, please,” and Tina said, “Sex on the Beach, please.”
To Dr.West’s glance, once he, in a bit of acting, recomposed himself from Tina’s order, I replied, “You first, sir,” and with his menu still open, Dr.West said, “Martini up, please, very dry, olives.” And I said to the waiter, “Same,” at which Dr.West nodded approvingly.
“Griffin, do you know how to make the perfect martini?” he asked.
“Into your shaker you add ice, then very good gin.
Next you take a capful of vermouth”and between his thumb and index finger he held up an invisible cap“wave it over your tumbler”he made several circles“and then throw it over your shoulder.”
At this, the girls, who clearly understood him, laughed.
We all considered our menus.
Dr.West, breaking the silence, asked, “Well, everyone, what looks good?” To which Amanda replied, “I think the filet,” and Tina said, “The duck à l’orange,” and I said, “What do you recommend?”
and Dr.West said, “I’ve got my eye on the fish en papillote,” to which I, having no idea what it was, replied, “I was just looking at that myself.”
The waiter was placing our drinks on the table.
Dr.West raised his glass and said, “To the romantics.” We all clinked, and when I sipped, what slid down my throat had the shininess and consistency of mercury and felt like a long snake made of ice.
Dr.West went on for a while about Shirley Hazzard.
He mentioned that her husband was translating the letters of Flaubert.
“Speaking of,” he said, and asked Amanda if she’d bothered to read the copy he’d sent her of Madame Bovary.
She replied that she was saving it for break.
“I’ll hold you to that when you come visit us at the beach,” Dr.West said.
“And what about you, Griffin? What are your summer plans?”
“I’ll be working,” I said.
Dr.West said to Amanda, “I like him more than Rob already.
And where, might I ask?”
“NBC,” I said.
“Griffin’s an actor,” Amanda said at her father’s piqued expression.
“He does TV and movies.”
Tina, who had taken a bite of bread, covered her mouth and grabbed my wrist.
“Wait, you weren’t Rudi Stein in The Bad News Bears, were you?”
“He’s in the new Alan Hornbeam film,” Amanda said.
“They shot it across the street from my school.”
Tina, impressed, said, “I loved Memento Morris. ”
“An actor,” Dr.West said.
“What school?” When I told him I went to Boyd Prep, he said, “No, I mean your formal training.
Like the Method?”
I had no idea what that was.
“It’s all baloney, of course,” he said, waving his hand before his face.
“Pasteurized.
Self-obsessed.
Quintessentially American.”
Tina looked at me gravely and then at Dr.West as if to say, Here we go again.
“The British gave us Shakespeare and negative capability.
America gave us autobiographical motivational narcissism,” he said.
“Griffin’s appearing in As You Like It, ” Amanda offered.
“At his school.
I’m going to see it next weekend.”
“And who do you play?” Dr.West asked.
“Charles the wrestler,” I said.
“Wonderful,” he said.
“And what do you make of it?”
I looked at Amanda, who looked at her father.
“I’m not sure I understand,” I said.
“Of what Shakespeare is trying to say.”
“I don’t…We don’t really talk about it like that.”
“How about this: What do you think of your character? What do you see as his function in the drama? Certainly you’d have to have some idea of that in order to do your job.”
“Well, he sort of explains everything,” I said.
“Like in Freytag’s Pyramid”
“Yes, but what motifs does he introduce? What plot levers does he pull?”
“I’m only in the first act,” I said.
In what remains one of the most intimate gestures I have ever seen, Dr.West pointed his remaining speared olive at Tina, and she, without hesitation, plucked it from the toothpick with her teeth.
“It sounds to me,” he said, “as if you don’t even have a rudimentary grasp of the play’s rhetorical architecture, let alone its plot.
Which is sad, when you think about it, at least”he starfished his hand against his chest“to me.
I mean, here you are, memorizing important literature, the most important literature there is, really, but you have no context for it whatsoever.
You’ve got your part down cold, as it were, but no idea of the whole.
You come onstage and say your lines, and then off you go.
Like a dolphin miming human speech.”
“Daddy,” Amanda said.
“No,” Dr.West said, “this is crucial.” And then to me: “When you perform next week, maybe keep in mind that it’s Charles who not only provides essential exposition to the audience but also supercharges the word ‘fall’ with meaning throughout the entire play.
Whether it’s to suffer a fall, as in lose one’s staturewhich Charles literally will do when Orlando stuns him with his wrestling victoryor fall in love, as Orlando and Rosalind do so suddenly and completely before the match transpires.
And as Touchstone and Audrey will upon their arrival in the forest of Arden.
And Phoebe with Ganymede.
True, I’ve often thought it’s nearly a deus ex machina that Duke Frederick falls in love with God toward the play’s end, his religious conversion seems so entirely out of character.
And, of course, there’s the pun fall on one’s back, which introduces the play’s anxiety about everything from cuckoldry to premarital sex.
And falling out of love, which stands in for the play’s greatest anxietyone which all the characters sufferwhich is the passage of time.
Time, which either ruins or changes everythingeven a love well begun.
And which, as Jaques notes in his ‘seven ages’ speech, none escapeits passage, I mean.
But we are all always wrestling with that one.”
Dr.West raised his eyebrows and smiled.
The waiter appeared with the wine bottle.
He went through his elaborate ritual.
As he filled the second glass and tipped the bottle toward the third, Amanda held her stem with one hand.
With her other, she took mine beneath the tablecloth and squeezed my palm comfortingly.
While I, thoroughly enjoying her secret attention, smoldered with determination.
Because I was officially sick and tired of not being in the know.