A Complicated Marriage (37 page)

I also started auditioning for musicals and was thrilled when I was offered the part of Sarah in a revival of
Guys and Dolls
. I still soar at the memory of the “I'll Know” duet. But the thrill was as short lived as the funding, which dwindled away. A particular heartbreaker was when I sang “Why Was I Born?” for Al Carmine, the theatrical guru of Judson Church, for a new musical he was staging. I could feel the heat in my body as I sang full out, opening myself to the breadth and joy of the sound. We talked a bit, but then he said, no, he had nothing for me. To give my all, the best that I could give, and not have it be enough, how wounding that was. And the idea of putting my whole self on the line again? Fuck it! And for a while, I pretty much did.

But there were good times in the loft. I learned that I could be casual, that I could live in a place where the door was always open. Friends, new people, there was always someone around. Thank God, because when the place was empty, it gave me the shivers. As for Mark and me, we were certainly an odd couple. But we genuinely liked each other, and I was drawn to his spontaneity and readiness to have fun, and of course I adored that he adored me. And I loved that he was great pals with Sarah, sometimes surprising me with how intuitive and protective he could be with her. I knew that people assumed our relationship was based on fantastic, older woman–hippie boy-toy sex, or some such. Fact was, the sex was terrible and I put an end to it early on. So, in that sense, I guess we were an odder couple than people even imagined. Our ties were simple: casual, yet close and caring. No surprise, “our song” was Rod Stewart's “Maggie May.”

Besides friends and gatherings, it was important to me that the space was used for theater, and several groups rehearsed there. The high point was when Charles Ludlam—the farouche impresario of the Ridiculous Theatrical Company, the Orson Welles of high camp—virtually moved in to rehearse his extravaganza
Eunuchs of the Forbidden City
. Charles, simultaneously profound and fey, so slight, so huge eyed, so astonishingly
imaginative, so vastly knowledgeable—to know him was to adore him. For the months he and his company were there, life was a circus. To Sarah's delight, they built their costumes there—oh, the kimonos and headdresses and wigs. And the group, all of them so damn nice: Charles, a vegetarian, giving me recipes in hopes I would clean up my nutritional act; the guys doing magic and acrobatics for us. And I still see the divine Black-Eyed Susan guiding Sarah as she tried to walk in Susan's foot-high platform shoes. And the immensely zaftig Lola Pashalinski dressing up the cats.

Yes, we now had two cats. Dick, an abandoned kitten who had adopted Sarah while we had been in West Shokan, New York, the previous summer. And Berry, an all-black Himalayan that Mark, an animal maven, found for us to keep Dick company. Sarah adored them, and they would reward her by living until they were nineteen.

Over the next few years, Charles and I stayed in touch, meeting for brown rice and tofu at his vegetarian hangouts in the East Village. His company flourished; he would become a legend. So much achieved in so little time. Only forty-four, he would die of AIDS in 1987.

Soon it was Sarah's turn to join the theatrics when Albert directed
Troilus and Cressida
as a Super Bowl face-off. I was Cressida, head cheerleader, Troilus was a clearly gay quarterback, Helen was homecoming queen . . . and Sarah was a mini-cheerleader who opened and closed the play as Pandarus's page, a part Albert created for her. Leave it to Albert, at the height of the Vietnam frenzy, to turn a tragic war play into an antic farce. The audience, not to mention the actors, were bewildered.

There were marvelous trips to Coney Island with Sarah and Mark, where I discovered that my six-year-old was actually a daredevil in disguise. Only the scariest, most topsy-turvy, fastest rides would satisfy her, while I cowered below. I, who had grown up with Rye's Playland in my backyard, threw up after being bullied onto the mildest of the roller coasters. Coney Island, so deliciously scuzzy and redolent of past glories. Just my thing. I would often seek out the grand Victorian beach hotels of my childhood that smelled of the mildew and must of the sea, where I could still hear the accordion's refrain of “Goodnight, Ladies” wafting through the corridors at night. And, too, the rococo movie palaces of
the thirties, the vestiges of their gilt and frescoes marking time until the wrecking ball. Such was the decaying charm of Coney Island for me.

There was a brief affair with Buddhism and with the come-hither actor who I met in Chekov's
Platanov
. The Buddhism lasted longer than the man, but not by much. And there was a strange encounter with two waifs and a sick dog. Kids in their late teens, a boy and a girl, filthy, destitute strangers to the city. Mark had befriended them in Times Square and brought them to the loft. We washed them, disinfected them, fed them—all three of them—and put them to bed in Robert's room. He was away, and Sarah was with Clem. I washed their clothes and dug up new ones for them. Disillusioned flower children abandoning the promise of Haight-Ashbury—now bearing the more prosaic label of “vagrants”—they were now hitching around the country, searching for the next Eden. Question was, what to do for them?

The next day, they answered the question themselves. We all got in the car to take the dog to a clinic. On the way, they became hostile, called us capitalist pigs, doling out charity, who the fuck did we think we were . . . At the next light they got out, and I drove off before they could change their minds. I understood the backlash—maybe I would have felt the same—but I wasn't about to take them on. We felt bad about the dog, though.

During the slow times, I took on a new project: researching early American drama. Bypassing melodrama and musical revues, I worked in libraries to ferret out the roots of homegrown realism. I had to believe American drama hadn't begun with Eugene O'Neill. Then I hit on the groundbreaker James A. Herne, a heralded playwright/actor/company manager who in 1892 wrote a simple play,
Shore Acres
, about a lighthouse keeper. Eschewing artifice throughout, the play ends as the old man, alone onstage, prepares for the night. The scene is long, silent, and intensely private. He goes about his mundane tasks, then extinguishes the gas lamps, until, the room illuminated only by the glow of the wood stove, he slowly exits.

Audiences must have been startled by these first steps into such naturalism: minimal footlights, no declaiming; instead, they became voyeurs into the life of an old man. Perhaps
too
startled, because the play was
never as successful as Herne's melodramatic productions. I like to think of
Shore Acres
as the first American drama. Fact was, though, it wouldn't be until the 1930s that tastemakers acknowledged that an American could write an important play. Light entertainment and musicals, yes. But not drama.

The scenario was certainly familiar to me. After all, until the 1950s, it had been inconceivable that America could produce great art, much less become the center of the art world. I continued to explore the theater's past, but as fascinated as I was by the material and its history, the solitude made me restless. I didn't want to read about theater—I wanted to do theater.

And, yes, there were drugs. Everyone I knew smoked grass and hash. Many dropped acid now and then. The heavier stuff was too expensive and harder to come by; it hadn't become mainstream yet. I was considered a dinosaur because, when pressed, I would admit that I preferred vodka. To much laughter. Although I joined in around the hookah or passing the joint, I never really took to it. Except for the acid. I don't know how many trips I took with friends, but there were quite a few during those loft years, and they were all good. For the first time I really heard music, saw color, saw a tree, and felt a lightness of being.

Besides doing a couple more good plays,
The Cherry Orchard
and
The Skin of Our Teeth
, I dipped a toe into TV. I got a three-day bit in
The Nurses
, a soap opera. All day to say a line or two, oh so boring once the fun of being plastered with makeup and being on camera wore off. But that was nothing compared with the agony of being an extra on a movie shoot at city hall. I showed up at dawn and by midafternoon was still loitering on the streets. When we were told we had to wait on the bus until we were called, I fled to the nearest subway, and that was that. Movie stardom would have to wait.

Rejections were one thing, but the lowest blow landed when I got fired. Once again, I had been pounced on by a gung-ho director, who thought he had discovered his perfect Eurydice for his production of Cocteau's
Orphée
. Problem was, he had an existing company of actors who from the outset resented the intruder. Who could blame them? Difficulties were compounded by the director's high-concept staging on a
cantilevered trampoline-type structure. Tempers flared as we attempted to be suitably tragic while striving to stay upright. The final straw for the cast was when the
Times
came to do a story before the opening and, instead of running a group shot, chose to run a close-up of me. A good picture—too good, I guess, because it must have led to all-out mutiny. The morning after opening night, the feckless director called and fired me. As miserable as I'd been, dodging bullets from the cast and balancing on that damn trampoline, that was a killer punch.

And then my two-year lease was up. The area, now hot enough to justify its own name, SoHo, was now hot enough to justify the landlord's doubling the rent. Too rich for our blood. Part of me was relieved, part not. I certainly would have preferred to leave what had been my first step toward an independent lifestyle on a higher, lighter, note. As it was, I could feel the shadow of depression over my shoulder.

Though I considered going back to 275, I knew that, feeling as discouraged and unfocused as I did, it would be a bad idea. Instead, sending Mark and Bob off on their way, Sarah and I moved back into the middle-class milieu of a two-bedroom floor-through in a Chelsea brownstone. Circumstances had been spiraling in the wrong direction for some time. Now I felt downsized in every way; my furniture was too big, I was too big. Everyone said, “How charming” and, “Imagine, two fireplaces.” I wanted to scream.

Soon, all that didn't matter much. I felt pain in my abdomen and was diagnosed with a fibroid tumor in my uterus and scheduled for a hysterectomy. I curled up, feeling old and withered. I whimpered. I was thirty-eight. It wasn't fair. Hysterectomies were for crones. I thought about the children, the other beautiful Sarahs, I would never have. I mourned the choice I would never have. And wondered if I would die.

While waiting, I spent long days at 275 with Clem. I felt safe with him, wanted to sponge up his calm perspective. But he was also uncharacteristically unnerved by the thought of the operation. When Clem was sixteen, his mother had died, and he had always blamed his father. Forget the mastoid infection and blood poisoning that killed her—his father hadn't made her happy enough. No wonder he had agreed with Cyril Connolly,
who once said to him that you could always tell a man's character by the health of his wife.

Me, I reverted to my mother's less convoluted, but even more misguided, mindset about actions and consequences: The cyst was retribution for my having been too happy, too free. And all that sex. What if I had never . . . ? I sat in Clem's office, the air thick with our misgivings and cigarettes, while Clem worked on “Can Taste Be Objective?” and I blanketed my brain with C. P. Snow novels in an attempt to rekindle our high times in England. And still wondered if I would die.

Then we were back at Doctors Hospital, that familiar site of previous tragedy and bliss. It was St. Patrick's Day. The big parade was nearby. I was a few blocks east. Emptied out. Scraped of my core. Cut open by men who had scooped out every reproductive organ in sight as if they were at an all-you-could-eat buffet, and hungry. I was not I. I was a slab of meat on a table. Now rendered genderless. By the time the parade was over, the sated butcher looked down at me and told me I had had a “radical hysterectomy.” He listed the many parts of me that were now garbage.

“Though the cyst was benign, it was the best way to proceed. You wouldn't want to have more problems down the road, now would you, young lady?” Terrified at the thought of a replay, I agreed, as he handed me a prescription for Premarin “to keep me shipshape.”

Clem was there day after day, pouring out his feelings and theories of self-blame, shouldering ownership of it all. His purification rite. After a while, part of me believed him, wanted to unburden myself of the thought that I had brought it on myself.
Yes, I give it all to you. Yes, it was all your fault
. But I couldn't. To do that would have left me nothing but the sour dregs of blame and resentment toward him. So on and on he talked his way through his pain, while I looked at the sky sheltering the East River and Queens and the planes slicing through it as they flew in and out of LaGuardia at exact six-minute intervals. I grabbed on to my physical pain as if it were a lifeline. At least it was real. Each throb and thrust told me I had not died. Now I wondered if I would ever walk upright again.

Three months later, Sarah, Albert, and I were on our way to Hamilton,
New York, home of Colgate University. We had been invited by a group of recent graduates to put on a summer production in a 1890s opera house in nearby Earlville. Earlville, home to a few hundred people, consisted of one streetlight and two blocks of abandoned buildings, one of which was the opera house. The Colgate group, having been gifted the property, had set up a nonprofit company to ensure the old theater's restoration and survival. They were looking to us to provide an event that would raise both money and awareness.

Our house for the summer would be a tiny tract house: paintings on velvet of matadors and señoritas, furniture cocooned in plastic covers, mustard shag rugs, and gold-flecked linoleum. It was all so perfectly what it was, a museum piece of American 1950s kitsch. Our first morning completed the picture when we awakened to a roar and shudder; the house abutted the end of the runway of the local airport.