Attack of the Theater People (18 page)

Twenty-seven

Naturally, my instinct
upon seeing my ex-stepmonster is to run screaming in the opposite direction. Instead I plunge into the empty deejay booth, pulling Hung in with me.

“Hallo?” Dagmar calls.

We hold our breath. I can tell because Hung’s lying on top of me.

Another voice answers, “I hope I’m not intruding.”

It’s Chad. He must have come up the other side.

“Not tat tall,” Dagmar says.

Silence. I imagine them each giving smoldering film noir looks.

“A beautiful woman like you ought to be in front of the camera, not behind it,” Chad says.

“I vas, in tse past. But now I am too olt.”

Hung sticks out his tongue like he’s gagging.

“I prefer a woman with experience.”

As the crowd below cheers the Giants, I imagine myself a sports announcer:
There’s the pass….

“Vat kind of experience do you like?”

“What kind are you offering?”

He’s running with it….

“I didn’t say I vas.”

“You didn’t say you weren’t.”

Look at him go!

“Chad Severson.”

“Chat Severson? I am Dagmar Teufel. I used to verk at Brooks Brothers.”

The TV in my mind suddenly goes black.

“Oh, yeah,” he says. “We talked on the phone, right? About, uh”—he snaps his fingers—“what’s his name…?”

“Edvard Tsanni.”

“Right. I saw something about him in the paper, didn’t I?”

Liar. Phony. Jerk.

“I thought he verked for you,” Dagmar says.

It suddenly occurs to me that he might say something worth taping. I try to reach my recorder, but I’m trapped underneath That Girl.

The tape
, I mouth to Hung.

What?
he mouths back.

I flick my eyes at my chest.
The. Tape.

Meanwhile Chad says, “I tried to help him out. He’s a troubled kid.”

Prick. Slimeball. Sleaze.

“Tsat boy belongs in
chail
. Ach, tse tings I could tell you about him.”

Hung slips his hand inside my jacket…

“Really?” Chad says. “Why don’t you—over dinner?”…he grasps the tape player…

“There’s this sweet place on Seventieth and Lexington. I know the chef. How about this Saturday?”

…he presses the button…

“I vould like tsat.”

…and my chest suddenly screeches…

I’VE GOT TO BE WHERE MY SPIRIT CAN RUN FREE, GOT TO FIND MY CORNER…OF THE SKY.

Hung and I both make a mad scramble to turn it off. Outside the booth I hear Chad say, “What the hell is that?”

With lightning speed, Hung hikes up his skirt and starts bucking his hips like he’s riding me, shouting:

“FREE ME, ETIENNE, FREE ME!”

Chad and Dagmar appear and I freeze, a deer in the headlights. A strange, French deer with troll-doll hair. Hung, on the other hand, doesn’t waste a second. Leaning over, he thrusts his face in mine and gives me a thorough dental exam with his tongue.

“Oh! Zo zorry,” Dagmar says.

Hung whirls around. “Well, you ought to be,” he says, or something approximating that, because he has a mouthful of white facial hair in his teeth.

Chad scowls. “What the fuck?”

I push Hung off of me and struggle to my feet, my sunglasses falling to the floor. “
Excusez-moi,
” I say. Then, grabbing Hung by the hand, I dash for the stairs.

The last thing I hear is Dagmar saying, “Who vuz Tsat Girl?”

I lie awake that night,
obsessing about Chad and Dagmar and what she could tell him about me. What if Natie’s wrong? What if she finds a way to nail me for embezzling that ten grand I stole from her in high school? Or, worse, goes to Lizzie and Judith and starts stirring up trouble? It doesn’t matter whether it’s true or not. She’s capable of anything, particularly when she’s hopped up on steroids for her allergies. By morning I’ve convinced myself that she’s doing everything in her malevolent power to ensure that I spend my life picking up trash on the side of the highway. I won’t rest until I know what they talk about on their date. Actually, I won’t rest until I can produce some evidence for the SEC by Friday the thirteenth. No, I won’t really rest until I’m completely in the clear, have found a way to pay for Juilliard, and convinced the faculty to let me come back.

Then I’ll relax.

In the meantime, I turn to the only person who can help me. Tuesday night I go to the box office of the Eugene O’Neill Theatre and ask to speak to Gavin O’Casey.

The box office woman sighs, clearly annoyed. Broadway box office people never seem happy about anything. They’re like the tollbooth attendants of the theater world. Without leaving her perch, she leans over and opens a little Hobbit door, muttering instructions.

While I wait, I scan the cast list of
Big River
to see if there’s anyone I know, a little game I play to torture myself. Either I feel shitty because I don’t know anyone in the cast, which means I’m obviously a nobody; or I feel shitty because I do know someone, which means I’m obviously a nobody. I have enough self-awareness to know how destructive I’m being, but I can’t help myself. I’m a hostage to my feelings.

Eventually Gavin pops his head through the gold metal doors, his tangled seaweed curls flopping over his wide, amphibious eyes. “Ouch,” he says, referring to my black eye.

“You should see the other guy,” I say. “Not a scratch.”

Not to get metaphysical about it, but there’s a particular energy to an empty theater. How could there not be? Audiences at the Eugene O’Neill have laughed at eight Neil Simon comedies, wept at the original production of Arthur Miller’s
All My Sons
, and jeered at one of the most notorious flops in recent memory,
Moose Murders
, a play so bad Frank Rich said its dialogue was only improved by its inaudibility. All of those experiences get trapped in the dusty theater air, which I inhale as if my life depended on it, breathing in as many magic moments as human biology will allow, then exhaling, leaving an invisible part of myself for future audiences.

This is where I want to be.

Gavin and I sit on the steps to the mezzanine stuffing inserts into
Playbill
s, Gavin making bridges with his long, skinny legs, like he’s doing yoga. I explain to him that this guy I’ve been seeing is cheating on me, and would he be willing to use his lipreading skills to help me spy? I feel bad lying to him, but I can’t risk him telling Paula about my insider trading. “We’ll get to wear disguises,” I say, hoping it all sounds like a madcap lark.

“When?”

“Saturday night.”

He frowns.

“What?” I say. “Will your boyfriend mind?”

“No, he works weekends, too. That’s the problem. I’m supposed to work.” He tosses his hair, the way pretty girls do. “I’ll try to get a sub. Hey, that reminds me, do you want to get on the list?” He looks down. “I, uh, saw in the paper that you lost your job.”

I lean over so I can see him. “That’d be great.”

He smiles. What a nice face he has, so sweet, yet melancholy. “Most of the ushers are old ladies,” he says, “but, for some reason the subs are gay guys. And, well, lately we’ve been short.”

The reason hovers in the air between us.

He writes a number on the back of an insert. “Call the union and ask for Hela. Tell her I recommended you.”

Sensing an opportunity for Natie to earn back Paula’s money, I ask Gavin if my roommate could do it, too.

“You mean the little guy helping Paula make money?”

Lose money, but why argue semantics?

“Sure,” he says. “He’s gay, right?”

“Yes,” I say.

Serves him right.

I come home to find Willow
curled up on my couch, all snuggly in an oversize mohair sweater and paisley leggings as she talks on the phone. She waves like there’s nothing unusual about her being here. “Oh, he just walked in,” she says. “Well, it was great talking to you, Joy. Yeah,
namaste
to you, too.” She hands me the phone. “It’s your mother.”

My mother’s name is Barbara.

“Mom?”

“Hello, dear one.”

“Who’s Joy?”

“I am,” she says.

“You changed your name?”

“I have your father to thank for it, which isn’t something you hear me say every day. When you told me he was getting married again, I thought, ‘Why am I still carrying this identity around with me? Who’s Barbara Zanni? She’s one of those legless suburban mothers you only see waving from the window of a station wagon as she ferries her children around.’”

“You never ferried us anywhere,” I say. “You sat in the house with the shades drawn, smoking.”

“That’s because I was miscast in my life as a suburban mother. And I did so ferry you. You just remember the bad parts.”

Actually, I remember a childhood spent in front of the TV imagining myself trading quips with Merv Griffin.

She continues: “So I thought to myself, ‘Who am I? What am I? I’m Joy! I’m
Joy
!’”

“Joy Zanni?” I say.

“No, your father’s name no longer serves. But neither does
my
father’s name. I was just telling Willow, women are property in this culture. That’s why they call them
sur
names.”

One advantage of living far away from your mother is that you can roll your eyes at her as much as you want.

“Okay,” I say, “so what’s your new last name?”

“Shapeshifter.”

“That’s not a name.”

“It is for the native people.”

“But you’re Polish.”

“This lifetime,” she says. “In the past I was a shaman.”

No one ever does anything ordinary in a past life. In past lives, believers always kneel and weep at the feet of the crucified Jesus or have their hearts yanked out by Aztec priests in a ritual sacrifice. You never hear about someone being a medieval serf sleeping in a mud hut with goats and pigs, then dying of cholera.

“That’s what your driver’s license says—Joy Shapeshifter?”

“Yes. I was gifted it by Zoozook.”

“Can you give it back?”

“Don’t be fresh. People come from all over to hear Zoozook’s teachings. Why, just the other day…”

And she’s off, sharing the mystical insights of a five-thousand-year-old Pleiadian star being as channeled by Odeen Huckins, the former Utah housewife who is now so disconnected from the earth plane her acolytes push her around the desert compound in a wheelbarrow.
I mm-hmm
and
uh-huh
her, but my mind drifts—not to the cosmos, but to my own surreal life. It’s official, I think. I’m an orphan.

“Edward, are you listening?” she says. “What Zoozook is trying to tell us is that we’re all star beings. When the universe first began it exploded into an infinite number of atoms. And that’s all we are—people, plants, furniture, cars—everything is starlight. There is no you. No me. No son. No mother.”

Barbara.

I mean Joy.

Whatever.

I hang up, deflated. Every good-bye with my mother is the first good-bye, a searing reminder of the day she walked out of our house in Wallingford and left on her magical mystery tour. I try to shake off the feeling by turning my attention to Willow, who seems positively logical by comparison.

“I hope you don’t mind me picking up your phone,” she says, “but I was sitting here—actually, I was sitting there—and it feels weird when someone talks on your answering machine like you’re not there but you really are—well, you weren’t, but I was. So I picked up and this woman says, ‘Who’s this?’ and I’m like, ‘Willow, who’s this?’ and she says, ‘Edward’s mom,’ and I’m like, ‘Oh, my God, I love Edward’s mom,’ so, naturally we got to talking about your spiritual health.”

Naturally.

“She said it was no accident that I’m moving in.”

“Whoa, wait, what?”

“Didn’t I tell you? I had to get away from Paula and Marcus. It’s like
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf
over there.”

“What happened?”

Willow rises and scoops up a set of darts from a cup. To his immense pride, Natie recently designed a dartboard made up entirely of prime numbers, creating a complicated scoring system that always seems to favor him. Willow throws a dart, missing the board by at least a foot. “Paula started taking these herbal diet pills that this friend of hers sells over the phone—which is really sad, because—well, I don’t know what’s in them, but they make her like
wooh
—and, c’mon, I left the apartment unlocked, what, two or three times, and she went—well, you understand, right?”

Actually, no. Willow always sounds like she’s translating into Chinese and back again.

She throws another dart at the wall. “And Marcus! Well, all I’ve got to say is…really, it’s kind of sad, if you think about it. He should be playing kings, not trying to…and I don’t care if Stanislavski did rehearse
The Cherry Orchard
for seven months; I still see no reason why we should jog around the reservoir at eleven o’clock at night in February.”

A third dart lands in the wall.

“Y’know, the object of the game is to hit the board,” I say.

“Anyone can do that,” she says, tossing a fourth. “Look, I’ve almost got the Big Dipper.”

I give up. “Where’s Natie?”

“He’s out buying bolts to install my hammock. Isn’t that thoughtful? He’s just about the most considerate, selfless person I’ve met in my whole life.”

“You sure we’re talking about the same guy? Red hair? A little cross-eyed?”

“When I told him I needed a place to stay, he didn’t hesitate. Of course, I’ll pay a third of the rent. Let’s see, $600 split three ways…”

“It’s $400.”

“What? How do you get $400 when you divide $600 three ways?”

“No, the rent is $400.”

“Each? You’re paying $1,200 to live
here
?”

I swear, talking to Willow is like knitting a sweater out of mashed potatoes.

“The. Rent. Is. Four. Hundred. Total.”

“Oh,” she says. “I could have sworn Nathan said it was $600.”

I clear a spot on Sweeney Todd’s chair. “Welcome to my life.”

“Oh, there was another call, too,” she says. “Some girl screamed, ‘Fuckwad,’ and hung up.”