Broken for You (4 page)

"Shit," Wanda said. As bare as this room was, as empty as she had tried to keep it, it told the whole story. It couldn't keep its damn mouth shut.

She wandered to the gimpy desk, on which rested a "Rooms for Rent" section she'd torn from the
P-I
several days ago. A few other entries were highlighted in yellow—Wanda had lots of highlighters, too—but Mrs. Hughes's ad was notable because the rental price, an unbelievable two hundred and fifty dollars, had been aggressively circled and surrounded with question marks and exclamation points.

Margaret,
Wanda remembered suddenly.
She wants me to call her Margaret.
That would take some getting used to; Wanda had been brought up to address her elders as "Mister" or "Missus."

She felt intensely grateful to be moving into a place that was noisy with someone else's history. Margaret herself was not noisy, and she was grateful for that, too, since her work as a stage manager required her for the most part to be around noisy people: actors.

Actors were, in fact, manageable, once you made peace with the fact
that they had never really evolved into adulthood—not even the oldest
and most cantankerous ones, the ones she addressed as "Mister": the
Scrooges and Tartuffes and Captain Hooks and King Lears. They were
players," in the truest sense of the word—at least the best ones were,
in
Wanda's opinion; and once you understood their love of play and cognized that they were exactly like children—children needing enor
m
ous amounts of attention and reassurance and, of course, limits—you mid manage them quite nicely. Actors could also provide a nice, suc
cu
lent, dessert-course variety of sexual diversion.

Wanda had a lot of experience in this arena; she'd been sleeping with
ac
tors ever since she was fifteen, when she and Brian McConnell had
su
rrendered their virginities to one another on closing night
of
The Music
M
an.
Brian was the sixteen-year-old star, and Wanda, having found her
voc
ation early in life, was the stage manager.

Closing nights had already become something of an emotional haz
a
rd for Wanda; they left her feeling uncharacteristically mournful and
cl
ingy. So when she and Brian discovered that the rest of the cast and
c
rew had left for the party and the drama teacher had accidentally locked
th
em in the catacombs of the costume shop—where, bogged down by
m
utual closing night melancholia, they'd taken forever to box up the
m
ounds of rented turn-of-the-century costumes that had to be shipped
b
ack to New York—Wanda suggested that they make the most of a icky situation. They were friends, they were equally inexperienced, the
f
loor was a feather bed of petticoats and band uniforms, and—having
b
oth recently completed a semester of health ed—they knew the impor
ta
nce of being prepared; between them, they had twenty-four condoms.

It was an hour and forty-five minutes before the night janitor noticed he light under the costume shop door and started jangling his keys. All
i
n all, Wanda's first sexual experience had turned out just fine. Not only hat: She'd found a surefire way to banish closing night blues.

She slept exclusively with actors after that—right up to the moment
w
hen she met Peter. Always on the go, always leaving, always looking head to the next big part, they had a flighty but infectious spirit. They
m
ade her laugh. She got to watch their spotlit hammy antics from the
o
bscurity of the sidelines; she liked that, too. And as she learned early m from Brian McConnell, good actors have a knack for improvisation,
m
aking them naturally gifted when it comes to sex—which is, of course,
u
nder the best of conditions a highly improvisatory event. But all that playfulness and self-absorption had a downside; eventually Wanda's
t
hespian paramours started to resemble the Lost Boys of Never-Never Land, and since she had no desire to be anyone's mother, invariably the
time would come for them to part. She was very careful to manage her personal dealings with actors as well as her professional ones, so that her affairs always ended amicably. This was important. Among stage folk, it is said that there are only thirty-three people in the theatre. To Wanda's colleagues, this expression has a generalized, benign meaning: "Everyone is connected, part of a family. Everyone knows someone you know." But to Wanda, it meant, "Don't burn any bridges, and don't screw and tell." She had never left bad feelings in the wake of a breakup. Of course, she also had to interact closely with many other kinds of theatre professionals—directors and designers and light board operators and theatre technicians—and she s
trictly forbade herself from be
coming romantically involved with any of them. She had to write cues, record blocking, attend production meetings, run rehearsals, oversee the running crews, command the proceedings of tech and dress rehearsals, maintain the quality and consistency of the show throughout its run. And she was good, very good, at all of it. But it was her ability to deal with actors—her skills as a peacemaker and go-between, her ability to smooth ruffled feathers, soothe bruised egos, and, when required, lay down the law—that made her a first-rate stage manager, one who could, based on word of mouth, her experience, and her qualifications, get work anywhere. She'd already secured a job at the biggest theatre in town, and she was confident that other jobs would follow.
That
part of her life, at least—the work part, where she was functional, extremely competent, and sane—would settle into a familiar routine.

This move into Margaret's house, however, was something entirely new, and she was mildly nervous about it. She had never in her adult life shared a living space with anyone but Peter. She had
certainly
never lived in a mansion with a woman of Margaret's age and apparent social
standing.

Good thing I was able to get my shit together before she threw me out of the house,
she thought, remembering how she'd rattled on about Peter and all but swooned in front of a total stranger.
I
came to him like a pilgrim?' Where the hell did THAT come from?

Wanda walked over to Mickey and Minnie, pulled them toward her face, and inhaled. Nothing there but extra-strength Tide and fabric softener. She yanked the towel down and kicked it out of the way. Drawing close to the mirror, she stared at her face for the first time in two weeks.

She looked like hell. She reached up and gave a few firm, quick tugs to her right eyebrow, then her left; several weak-looking, dark, curving hairs stuck to her finger and thumb. She flicked them onto the floor.

“Thank God I’m getting out of here,” she said out loud. “Thank God for Mrs. Hughes.”

By cab, Wanda's first trip to Margaret's had been an easy twenty-minute
ride, culminating in an ascent up a winding street so dark and densely
wooded that, even encased in the safety of a taxi, Wanda had felt like
an endangered character in a Grimm fairy tale. But the woods cleared
at the top of the hill, and there was the Hughes mansion.

"Are you sure this is the right place?" Wanda had asked the cabdriver. He looked down at the piece of paper she'd handed him when she got in the cab. "Yeah. This is it. You're gonna rent a room
here?"

“Maybe.” Wanda kept her eyes on the house as she gathered her things.

The Hughes residence—which sat on a huge lot in a neighborhood
where all
the houses were mansions—was astonishing: towering ornate pillars, tiered and cantilevered porches, multipeaked roof, leaded and stained glass windows. There was even an adjacent carriage house. But beneath all this grandeur, Wanda sensed something tired and sad. An art historian would have described the Hughes mansion as a splendid example of early-nineteenth-century Neoclassic/Romantic hybridism; but to Wanda, the house looked like a big neglected wedding cake.

"Geez. How much rent are they gonna be chargin' you?" Wanda paid the cabbie and got out of the car. "Not nearly enough." Then she started up the steps toward the massive front porch.

She'd be a perfect Mother Abbess,
Wanda thought when Margaret opened the door. Solid and androgynous, she looked nothing like her voice— which on the phone had been oddly high-pitched and squeaky. Margaret's eyes, though, were the real surprise. They were shimmering, reflective. The turquoise of a glacial lake on the fairest day of summer. It was her eyes, Wanda decided later, that had disarmed her so completely. Why else would she have launched into her long confessional about Peter and come so utterly undone? Stupid. She'd nearly ruined her chance to win what had to be the best rental bargain in the city.

The inside of the house was as remarkable as the outside. It had been built in 1909, Margaret explained, at a time when wealth from the Alaskan gold rush and the accompanying timber and shipping industries had begun transforming Seattle into a boomtown. Her father had been an investor in these growing industries. "He was good at making money," she said dryly.

The house was fifteen thousand square feet—the floor space of an average three-bedroom home, Wanda calculated, multiplied by ten— and it contained one amazing architectural feature after another: parquet floors, gilded canvas murals, carved oak columns and capitals, ornate plaster ceilings, brass fixtures, marbled and tiled fireplaces. Just this side of rococo, all of it was glistening and pristine and impeccably maintained. The outside of the house and its grounds may have been suffering from neglect, but on the inside, it could have been brand new.

And then there were Margaret's things. They were kept in glass-fronted built-in and freestanding cabinets which lined the walls of virtually every room in the house. The dining room alone contained what had to be thousands of pieces of functional dinnerware, coffee and tea sets, and serving pieces. Margaret identified a few of these, listing their names with detachment, as if she were reading from an insurance schedule. "Sherbet pails, 1781. Pigeon pie tureen, 1851. Chocolate service, 1815. Cheese bell, 1870. Tete-a-tete, 1775. Oyster stand, 1862. Strawberry dish, 1868. Ewer and basin, 1790. Coffeepot, 1730 . . ."

As they moved through the rest of the house, Wanda discovered that there were even more pieces that were purely decorative. In the small downstairs parlor, one cabinet contained animals in general—cats, foxes, sheep, squirrels, horses, lions, elephants, camels, cows—while another was devoted to various breeds of porcelain dogs. The large parlor was populated with grouped figures: hunting parties, mothers and children, cupids, courting peasants, boccie players, Greek gods. And on and on . . .

"Are all of these porcelain?" Wanda had asked.

"Not all, but many."

"Where did they come from?"

"My father. He owned an antique shop in addition to his investments. Here's the library."

The walls were lined with floor-to-ceiling bookcases. One of these had been appropriated for Margaret's collection of single human figures
(dancers, soldiers, circus performers, map sellers, slaves, kings, musicians, and two entire commedia dell'arte troupes); the other cases were full of books. Most of them were related to art and art history, antiques, ceramics and porcelain, fine furniture. There were classic works of fiction as well (Dickens, the Bronte girls, Thomas Hardy) and another large nonfiction section was devoted mostly to World War II, religion, and European history.

"I hope you like to read," Margaret had said, completely without irony. "I would want whoever takes the room to feel free to borrow anything from the library, anytime."

The downstairs guest quarters, which Margaret referred to as "the Aviary Suite," housed porcelain birds: swans, peacocks, geese, quail, pheasant, parakeets, falcons, ducks, and a single golden eagle. Each of the upstairs bedrooms, too, were identified by their contents: the Bonbon Dish Room, the Smoke and Snuff Room, the Game Pie Tureen Room, and so on. Margaret's room was full of porcelain children. The room that would be Wanda's displayed glossy pyramids of vividly colored food.

What struck Wanda as even stranger than the
volume
of Margaret's possessions was the laconic way in which she described them, the obvious lack of pleasure she took in being their owner. Wanda noticed that certain names
{Factory names, maybe? Manufacturers?)
came up again and again: Capodimonte, Meissen, Popov, Sevres, Vincennes. She memorized bits of new terminology: soft-paste, hard-paste, biscuit-ware, majolica.

"Maybe you can tell me," Wanda ventured. "I've never really known what porcelain
is
exactly, what makes it prized."