You Have To Kiss a Lot of Frogs
“That was fun,” I said, breaking the silence. “Thank you.”
“Yeah,” he said, putting his hands in his pocket. “I don’t make that much of these things. I’m glad you came though. I’m worried about my dad. Okay if we walk back to your place instead of a cab?”
There it was again. Nothing that said this is great and nothing that said it was over. We walked south on Central ParkWest toward my apartment on 78th Street. We walked in the relationship silence. Not the good kind where you know you can’t wait to get each other home and into bed, but the ambivalent kind. The kind where one person has more power because they know they’re the one who’s holding back. But they’re not telling you they’re holding back, and since you don’t really know this for sure, and you certainly don’t want to make a big deal out of nothing and create a problem that may not even exist, you decide you’re overly sensitive, paranoid, insecure. All of the above. You have no choice but to smile sweetly, keep your unspoken agreement in the relationship silence, and hope the other person will break it. That any second it will be broken by him seductively pushing you up against the bricks of the next building, off to the side of the burgundy awning, gently moving his hands across your cheeks, pulling back your hair and tenderly, deeply, passionately kissing you and kissing you and whispering in your ear, “Let’s get out of here. Let’s go home.” On the other hand, you could suddenly find yourself on 78th Street turning right to Amsterdam Avenue and wonder how you got there.
“David, do you want to come up?” The telling moment that can make or break it.
“Sure, I’ll stay.”
We rang for the elevator and I thought about the summer. One night in July I had just gotten back home after a weekend on the Cape. I felt really good, my skin was a little tanned and my hair had that great windblown look from sailing. I was wearing a pair of white shorts and a short sleeveless green tank top. My best friend Jane had come over. I looked at her when the buzzer rang.
“Expecting someone?” she asked.
The abrupt sound of the buzzer caught us in the middle of “haircut interruptus.” Jane had just gotten back from ten months on the road doing the lead in a national tour. She played a character in a fairy-tale musical where people appeared to be destined to live unhappily ever after. Despite her better judgment she got her hair cut in Detroit, just before returning to New York. We were in my bathroom pushing her thick black hair in every direction desperately trying to make it right. We had met on a national tour years earlier, rocking and rolling our way through high school in the fifties. Jane was full of passion and insight, loved her work and family. And even in the face of the haircut drama had the great vision to know that ultimately “it would grow.” I really admired her for that. I pressed the intercom and heard David’s sleepy voice.
“Hey—can I come up?”
“Yeah,” I said, before even checking with Jane. “That’s him! That’s the doctor guy. You’ll get to meet him.”
David came up to my apartment and had his bike with him. He had been riding around the city and missed me. I was very excited he showed up. But the excitement of surprising me, meeting my friend and telling me I was beautiful quickly evaporated, and the three of us just sat there in an awkward quiet till Jane said it was time for her to leave.
“I’ll walk you down to the lobby, Janey,” I said. “David, hang out. I’ll be right back.”
I stood in the elevator with Jane waiting for approval. Nothing came.
“So?” I wanted her to say something great about him.
“He’s cute,” she said.
“Yeah. He is, isn’t he? The dark hair and eyes.”
“And he seems to like you a lot.”
“Yeah? Yeah.”
The elevator opened and a couple with a little terrier got in. We stood in front of the glass double doors.
“What, Jane. You can tell me.”
Jane looked at me with eyes that said she wanted to be a good friend and didn’t want to hurt me.
“I’m just not a fan of ambivalent relationships,” she said.
“Oh. That.” My heart sunk. I knew she was right. I wound up missing David even when I was with him. He was far away when he was right next to me. Was it the hospital, his schedule, his dad, me? Or was it just David? When I went back upstairs David was already asleep.
Now, almost two months later, nothing between us had become any more clear. Except now I would be working in Philadelphia for an unknown amount of time. I decided the distance would be good. Our visits would be great. Absence makes the heart grow fonder. And I decided it wasn’t me, it wasn’t David, it wasn’t us and it wasn’t work. I decided David was just concerned about Sid.
He talked about his father our last night together before I left town with the show. “You do know, David, that you’re really lucky to have a dad like that.”
David knew. David also knew his father’s health was failing. So as the year progressed he did all he could to get through the intern program and make his father proud. But David was unhappy. He probably suffered more from sleep deprivation than unhappiness, but his undefined unhappiness gnawed at him. It colored our relationship gray. Murky. Ambivalent. Still, I wanted David. I wanted to belong to what seemed so appealing during the holiday. I spent the next six months in Philadelphia missing David, playing a nun and living like one.
In the spring David and I took a vacation to St. Barts. I had high hopes. The island was gorgeous and David and I were great travel partners. We rented a Jeep and he drove through the hills like James Bond. Every night we drank a bottle of wine on a new beach and brought in the sunset. We skinny-dipped and ate fabulous French food. We hiked and took a boat to St. Marten. We did everything you do on a vacation but make love. By the end of the week David went back into his ambivalent silence and we broke up on the plane coming home.
I was very sad to lose David and, as time went on, realized I was very sad to lose Sid. The night David brought me home from Philly, we stopped up to see Sid and Kitty. Sid had been in bed all day. His birthday party was canceled. He was not receiving guests. When we arrived, Sid came out of his room wearing a Dartmouth sweatshirt and jeans. He looked ten years older than when we had first met.
“Do you know how close Sid feels to you to be able to have you visit?” Kitty asked while I was helping her in the kitchen with the coffee.
Sid was quiet that night, but let me know how important I was. How good I was for David.
“I hope David thinks so,” I told his father. I wanted to tell Sid to make David stop it. To wake up. To open up and let go. But a father cannot do that for a son. A person can only do that for himself. I needed to think about me and what I was really getting from David, and not what I hoped I would get from David “if only.”
I called the Friedman house a few times after our breakup, and ran into Kitty once in H&H buying bagels. Then one night as I was drifting off to sleep, finally feeling better having turned the corner on David, he called.
“My father died,” David cried into the phone. “He was in his bed at home, in his sleep. I just saw him that day. He told me his disappointment in our breakup. He had told me I could never do better than you. I miss my daddy.”
David came over and we made love. Real love. Free and unencumbered, tender and a little wild. We decided to try again after Sid was buried. And it worked. For a little while. A very little, little while. Perhaps I represented a link David had to his dad. However, it did not make him more appreciative of me. He was just going through the motions. I was reactive. I would react to David’s moods. His advances and withdrawals. I twisted into positions like a Gumby, until I finally made myself stop.
David missed his father. I missed his father too. And I missed my father. My idea of a father. I sure loved Henry, but it never was a substitute for not knowing my real father. Mel had become a fictional character in my life. The clown who threw all the emotions of my childhood up in the air and juggled them like colored balls, unconcerned if they stayed up there or crashed to the floor.
In my mind, David had had the perfect suburban childhood. I assumed the love David received from his dad made everything easy for him. I assumed anyone who had a dad like David’s grew up happy. I didn’t get David’s darkness. I made an open-and-shut case that didn’t hold water. Perfect father equals perfect life. Not true. Nonetheless, I kept to my theory and hoped it would turn David into who I wanted him to be. And I thought my connection to David and Sid would turn me into everything I wanted to be. That it would erase everything Mel was unable to be. Mel. An embarrassment. My secret. On dark days, the likes of Mel made me question myself. Made me think I could never get a guy like David. But what was a guy like David? Only over time could I see that a guy like David wasn’t worth having.
Life moved on and I chose to keep David out of mine.
5
Whose Party Is This Anyway
Daylight Saving Time Ends
Grand Central Station, NYC 1989
I stood at a pay phone on the corner of 42nd and Madison, checking my answering machine in the hope there would be a message that anyone called to hire me to do anything. New York City was in a recession. I suppose the rest of the country was too, but they were not my concern. I was concerned about me on the island of Manhattan. My unemployment claim was about to expire, I only had two regional commercials running and I needed a job. There were no messages. I thought I’d check again. My change fell back down into the slot and then dropped on the ground. I bent down to pick it up, but I couldn’t see a thing. We had moved the clocks back last night and now I was well rested, but felt blind. I could barely see. It was so dark out and still so early! It couldn’t be much past lunchtime, I thought. I tilted my watch up toward the streetlights and saw, in fact, that it was almost rush hour. As I gathered up my dimes and nickels, I noticed a pair of familiar feet walk by.
“Fred,” I called out, stopping my friend in his tracks. “Where are you going?” I stood up, putting my change back in my purse.
“To work.”
“Wow! Work. What do you do?” I asked.
“Oh, I’m working at Whiting and Ransom,” he said. He was totally not excited. “They call it a law firm, but it seems more like a cover for white slavers to me. Ransom indeed… Right.”
“Oh. So. Really. What do you do there?”
Fred paused for dramatic effect before he finally answered.
“Proofreading.”
“Proofreading,” I said. “Really! You know how to do that?” I was impressed.
“Any idiot can learn.” Fred had just finished doing a showcase production Off-Off B’way where he played a woman. He looked pretty good with red lipstick and dangling earrings. It had gotten him great attention and an agent, but apparently it hadn’t readily turned into income.
“Where are you going?” he asked.
“Me? No place. I have no job. Hey,” I said, “I’ll walk you to yours, okay?”
“Okay,” he said. “We’ll have to go through Grand Central. I’m working there two days and I already know all the shortcuts.”
I loved rush hour in New York. Swarms of people moved by us in rapid succession. It was like a movie montage of people hurrying, scurrying to buses, trains and planes. Fred worked the graveyard shift and went to work at five o’clock when everyone else went home.
“This is great!” I said. “I don’t get this in my apartment.”
I accompanied Fred through Grand Central Station, onto the escalator into the Pan Am Building, and continued to ride the elevator with him to his office. I walked him down the hall and into reception, when he finally turned and blocked me with his hand.
“You have to stop! Now! You can’t go farther than this. You can’t come with me to work,” said Fred.
“But what am I going to do?” I walked Fred to the end of the reception area, peeking through the archway into the long hallway. “Hey. How do the guys look here? Have you had time to check anyone out?”
Fred and I had met in acting class five years earlier. The teacher assigned us a scene where I played a girl whose plans to hang herself were put on hold until she met her new next-door neighbor. Just in case he turned out To Be Somebody.
A nice-looking guy whisked by us down the corridor. I followed him with my eyes until I saw the band of gold glittering from a stack of briefs. “Too bad,” I told Fred. “So, any cute lawyers around here you can fix me up with?”
“I’m looking for the same thing myself,” said Fred.
“Well, keep your eyes open! For both of us!”
“We’ll double,” said Fred, pointing for me to walk back to the direction of the elevator bank. “I don’t want to be late.”
“How are things going with Larry? Good? Maybe one night you and Larry, and me and a lawyer cou—”
“I’ll talk to you later,” said Fred, literally pushing me toward the elevator.
“Maybe tomorrow,” I called out after him. “Maybe tonight,” I said, getting into the elevator. “I can call you here. I bet I can get a job accompanying people to their jobs. What do you think?”
The elevator doors shut tight before I found out.
Earlier that day I tried to sign up with a Temp Agency. STAR TEMPS: YOU CAN STILL BE A STAR WHILE YOU WAIT FOR THAT BREAK! The moment I walked in the door I knew I did not want to be there. They gave me a written test.
Here are three numbers: 162, 539 and 287.
Which number is the biggest?
Which number is the second biggest?
Which number is the third biggest?
Not the smallest, the third biggest. There were thirty-five problems. That made a page of one hundred and five sets of numbers. My eyes were starting to cross. 1086975, 1097656, 1086456. There were no commas. I was losing my mind. I went to the guy at the desk. I did not want to take the test.
“I do not want to take this test,” I said to the guy at the desk. “I am a college graduate. I know how to count.”
“If you want to be a file clerk you have to take this test,” he said.
“I don’t want to file.”
“Are you saying you don’t want to be a clerk?”
“I’ll be a clerk,” I said. “But I don’t want to file.”
“All clerks have to file. Unless you type. You type?”
“I do. I’ll be a typist.”
“Clerk-Typist,” said the guy. “Is that what you want to be?”
“Yes. Yes! That’s exactly what I want to be. And Receptionist.”
“What?”
“Receptionist,” I said. “I can answer the phone.”
“Well, which? Clerk-Typist or Receptionist?”
“Both.”
“Both? What do you mean?”
“Clerk-Typist Slash Receptionist. That’s what I mean. I can type. I can answer the phone.”
“I don’t get it.”
“There’s nothing to get. I can do both. I can type. I can answer the phone. Clerk-Typist Slash Receptionist,” I said looking into his blank face, feeling the need to repeat it as if I was speaking Greek.
“Oh. Then you have to take a typing test.”
I left.
It had started to rain. I reached into my bag for my umbrella and pulled out a recent copy of Backstage. There was an ad for an audition cross-town in Hell’s Kitchen for a show. A nonpaying show. A showcase. A musical. The call was for WOMEN: TWENTIES AND THIRTIES. I fit.
I walked from STAR TEMPS until I saw a small sign pounded into the brick wall along the side of an alley on 52nd Street near Ninth Avenue. The sign had the initials ACT. Artists Creating Theater.
I entered. The place looked like an old-fashioned casino in the Catskills that had been ransacked. An unkempt, overweight man sat next to his disheveled-looking ten-year-old son who was singing along with the out-of-tune piano. Finally the man playing the piano spoke.
“Would you like to sing something a cappella?” he asked me.
Actually, no…I did not want to sing something a cappella.
“What are my other options?” I asked.
“I can play a couple of chords,” he said.
He kept his word and played a four-chord introduction. My song was from the musical Fiorello.
“What a situation, ain’t it awful,” I sang a cappella.
The phone rang.
“Keep singing,” said the big guy. “Come on, Timmy,” he said to his son. “Let’s go answer it.”
The guy at the piano who had played the four chords stopped my singing. He told me he was really a songwriter and began teaching me a song from the show.
“What’s the piece about?” I asked.
“Well,” he said. “I wrote ‘It’s No Party.’ Remember that song? ‘It’s No Party.’”
“Sure, I remember,” I said.
“This is a musical about that song,” he said. “It’s about all of those people.”
“What do you know!” I was speechless.
“Oh, yeah,” he said. “Remember Ditzy left with Donny? Well, they got married. Now it’s over thirty years later and they’re getting divorced.”
“You don’t say!”
“You’d be Ditzy’s daughter who moved back with her mother because she’s also getting divorced. She and her ex-husband-to-be have a great number together where they fight over who gets the furniture.”
“Is it good furniture?”
The songwriter took a moment to chuckle at this. He looked to me to respond.
“Gee, what an interesting concept,” I told him. “When do you open?”
“We are open. We’re running,” he said. “We play Monday nights. I’m double-casting the show. It’s a big hit, you see, a really big hit, and the guy who plays your ex just got picked up for a new show. He’s hot. They saw him in this show and everybody wants him. I can’t afford to lose any more actors. That’s why I’m double-casting. Everybody in this show is hot. Really hot.”
“That’s, um…great!” I said. “Really great.”
“Hey, you’ve got to take this call,” the big guy yelled across the casino. “It’s California. Important. Someone who might want to do the show.”
“Well, thanks,” I said, gathering my music.
“Please don’t go yet,” he said. “I like your voice. You have a good sound. This will just take a minute.” He walked over to the black dial phone that was mounted under the sign that read Things Go Better With Coke.
I sat a few minutes and waited.
“Hey, Timmy knows every song from the show,” said the big guy. “Listen to him sing. He’s terrific. Timmy, sing a couple of songs for the girl. You don’t mind?”
“No,” I said. “No, not at all.”
Timmy sang. And sang. And sang. Timmy wasn’t bad. Fifteen minutes later he pooped out. The songwriter was still on the phone. I bid Timmy adieu, wished him luck and headed for the door. I stopped by the phone and tapped the songwriter on the shoulder.
“It’s getting late. I have to go,” I said. “Thanks.”
He stopped talking and cupped his hand over the mouthpiece. “I like your voice,” he said. “You have a really good sound. I’ll invite you to see the show. You’ll get a call.”
Out in the alley I could still hear him talking. Long-distance.
“Send me your tapes. I need to hear your sound. Can you send them overnight express? We’re moving fast on this one. It’s a big show. I wrote it. Remember the song ‘It’s No Party’? You do? Well, I wrote that. Yeah, ‘It’s No Party.’ That’s my song.”
I hoped for the songwriter all would go well. It was, after all, the darkest day of the year.
6
A Clue in Time Saves Nine
Tisha B’av
Greenwich Village, NYC 1990
He was funny. At first, nothing special to look it. On a closer look—still nothing special to look at. But definitely funny. He had definite appeal.
Fred, and his boyfriend, Larry, were having a picnic in the park. It was supposed to be a big group, but turned out to be the three of us and a couple and their baby from the next blanket who visited for a while. Just as we were finishing the Brie, a friend of Larry’s from his gym showed up. Some guy he recently met who decided to show Larry the proper way to use free weights.
“You’re only two and half hours late,” said Larry. He started to pack up the small remains of what had been a feast. You come late, you don’t eat. He didn’t say it, but he said it. “Where were you?”
The guy went into an elaborate explanation of not being able to find us.
“The Turtle Pond, in front of the rocks in the middle, directly to the side of the Delacorte Theater,” said Larry. “How hard is that?” Larry was an accountant. Everything was black or white.
“Did you know all the lampposts have the street numbers written on them? If you can decode it you can never get lost in Central Park. It took me hours till I could find someone to break the code. By then I was at 105th Street, looking at the gardens—which by the way are really beautiful—before I figured it out and came down here.”
I looked at him with his balding head and life jumping out of his pores. He was out of his mind. He could not have been that lost as to not realize he was miles out of his way. Still, I was interested to know about the lampposts.
“Come on,” he said, looking at the two guys lounging on the blanket with all the food obviously eaten. “Take a walk with me and I’ll show you.”
We walked and talked. Andy told me a lot about himself. Too much in fact. He had just come back from Paris where a fortuneteller told him that he, Andrew Ackerman from Bayside, Queens, was a reincarnation of his former self. A French lieutenant. A hero.
He was very excited about this. He was very excited about everything. If Andy got turned on to an author he’d read everything he could and then move on. The same about a food, a place and a profession, which he seemed to have many. It stood to reason he would be like that about a person too. But he was a trip to be with.
Andy called the next day. After the park. The phone call was interrupted by six call-waiting beeps. He wouldn’t answer any of them, because he said he knew it was his ex-fiancée from eight years ago.
“You know this?” I asked. “How do you know this?”
“It’s a long story,” said Andy. “You don’t want to hear it.”
“Okay.”
“So let me tell you what happened. I wanted to go to Paris. I love to travel, you know, and I needed a place to stay. My ex-fiancée lives in Paris now, and she told me I could always call her and she’d put me up, so I did. Jesus, what a disaster. She was so crazy. She was furious with me because I didn’t desire her anymore. She was attacking me. Finally, by the third night, I had to move out to the couch. And you know what I overheard her tell her neighbor? ‘Stay away from him. He devours people.’ Can you believe it?”
I think he had given me a clue to his personality. I was pretty certain he had given me a big, big clue.
“So,” he went on, “you know what today is? I’m also into holidays.”
“Uh, no,” I said. “What am I missing?”
“Happy Tisha B’av!” said Andy.
“What is that again?” I asked. “All I know about it is that when I was a kid in day camp this girl in my group, Hope Moskowitz, said she couldn’t go swimming because of that holiday. She was religious. It was a boiling hot day in July and I felt bad for her.”
“Well,” said Andy, “it was my favorite holiday to study when I was in Hebrew school, and believe me, I wasn’t one of those nerdy guys or anything. But Tisha B’av was when not one, but two temples in Jerusalem were destroyed. Then for three weeks after that you go into this, like, period of mourning when all these tragedies can strike. Very cool. So—do you want to go out and do something sometime?”
“Ummm,” I said, aware that “yes” should not be my first response, based on the information at hand. “Maybe,” I mustered.
“Do you have someone specific in mind?”
He made me laugh. What the hell, Andy was alive and full of energy, and I thought he was funny.
A few nights later we had dinner. Andy was really nice. He took me to an Italian restaurant on Cornelia Street where he knew the chef.