The Red Book (25 page)

“Sometimes the most facile, obvious interpretations hit the closest to the mark,” says Lodge.

“Or maybe I’m just stupid.”

“Come on, Jane. You’re not stupid. We’re all guilty of willful ignorance. You can’t graduate from Harvard and call yourself stupid.”

“Oh yeah?” Jane says, standing up. “Watch me.” She walks over to the mirror hanging on the far wall of the office and points at herself. “Stupid,” she says. “
Estúpida
.
Imbécile
. . .” She looks over her shoulder at Lodge. “Got any other languages up your sleeve?”

“Just a couple of years of high school Greek.”

“I’ll take ’em.”

“Um,
lollo
? I think. Yes.
Lollo
.”

“
Lollo
. I like it.” She points at herself once more. “
Lollo
,” she says.

Lodge laughs. “Feel better?”

“Much.”

“Great. That’ll be two hundred and fifty dollars please.” For a split second, Jane wonders whether he’s serious until Lodge steps around his desk and, seeing Jane’s expression, starts to laugh. “Oh, come on.
Now
you’re being stupid.”

“See? I told you,” she says, pointing to her head. “
Estúpida!
”

“Actually,” says Lodge, “I was just thinking that I’m the stupid one.”

“Why?”

“For not forcing your mother to marry me. For not getting the privilege of being your stepfather.” He sighs, and in that sigh, Jane sees the ravages of time and regret.

“No one could force Mom to do anything,” she says. “If you knew her at all, you knew that.”

“I know. Believe me, I know. But maybe I could have tried a little harder. Listen, speaking of your mother, I meant to ask: What are you going to do about her house? She was worried about leaving you with that burden.”

“I don’t know. The
Globe
wants me back here, but Bruno wouldn’t be able to work here, even if he had a green card. His English is passable, but it’s not like there are a lot of editing jobs just waiting to be filled. I mean, first I have to decide if we’re even going to stay together. Sophie is young enough that a move won’t be that hard, but, well, it’s complicated. To say the least.”

“I’ll tell you what,” says Lodge. “I know this is out of left field, but if you end up deciding to sell the house, I’d like to be first on your list of potential buyers. I’m thinking of selling my own house, starting afresh. It hasn’t really been a happy home, if you know what I mean, and I don’t like the constant reminder, plus your mother’s house has more bedrooms, and at the rate my sons are going, I’ll have six grandkids by next Christmas. Plus I guess I figure if I were in your mother’s house, I’d be, you know . . .”

“Happy?”

Lodge shrugs. “Something like that.”

Jane smiles. “You really did love her, didn’t you?”

“Yeah,” he says, his glasses misting slightly. “I really did.”

“Would I be allowed to come back and visit?”

“Oh, Janie, are you kidding me? You and your daughter could have your own wing. It’s just me now.”

“I’ll think about it,” says Jane, exiting the office without correcting her name. It’s fine, she thinks. Let him call me Janie. Then she gently tears Sophie away from the DVD and tries to answer the many questions provoked by the elongation of Pinocchio’s nose.

•  •  •

“You’re here for
the A.R.T. auditions?” says the young, bespectacled pit bull in a floral miniskirt guarding the entrance to the Loeb Drama Center. She holds the one unlocked door ajar just a crack with the tip of her combat boot, a signal to any student still on campus, any random passerby, any person not here for the express purpose of trying out for the 2009–2010 season of the American Repertory Theater that trespassers will not be tolerated. But before Mia can laugh nervously and say oh my God, no, sorry, we’re just alumni poking around, we’ll come back another time, Clay is already assuming a character.

“Why yes we are,” he says, scanning the clipboard and seeing
SATURDAY, JUNE 6/FEMALES
splashed in 48-point Helvetica across the top, with numbered blank spaces beneath it, a few already scribbled in with the names and contact numbers of the hopefuls. “My lady here’s trying out, and I’m here to root her on.”

Clay’s enthusiasm, his spontaneity, his ability to role-play both on the stage and off used to rub off on everyone, Mia included. There are people in the world, she thinks, who make you a better version of yourself. Or at least a more authentic, less-inhibited version. When Clay left her for Luba way back when, her heart was crushed, but what she missed most was their melding of minds, not bodies. In fact, Clay was fairly hesitant in the bedroom department, for what are now—and were back then, for anyone paying attention—obvious reasons. “Always gotta bring the cheering section,” says Mia, jumping into the role of Clay’s “lady,” replete with southern drawl. She feels a giddiness she hasn’t felt in years. “I hope we’re not too late.”

She wonders if the girl’s nose ring ever gets snagged in the moth holes of her sweater. What is it with this new generation of young women? Trilby’s tongue ring this morning; Max’s friend from preschool (or so she’d learned through Facebook) with her pierced labia. When Mia recently ran into labia girl and her boyfriend, she couldn’t help wondering about mechanics. Did she remove the hoop before sex? Was she even having sex yet? Not something you can really ask, although getting one’s labia pierced, like the colorful flags put up by the shop owners of new businesses, seems as good an indicator as any that the store’s open for business. Standing in line behind the couple at a Peet’s coffee on Sunset, seeing the boy rub his thumb over the viper tattoo at the small of the girl’s back, Mia had to mentally will herself not to picture his penis getting scraped by the backing.

When did mutilation come to signify female boldness? she wonders. Or, if all of them are getting pierced and tattooed, is it less about boldness and more about the kind of conformity that had her sitting in that Woodmere salon, circa 1982, getting an ill-considered perm? At least the perm grew out. She imagines Max’s preschool friend many years hence, removing the hoop to give birth. She fast-forwards a few years after that, as the new mother’s toddler discovers the snake above his mother’s ass. “What’s that, Mommy?” “Oh, that? That’s my viper.”

“You’re right on time,” says the nose-pierced clipboard wielder, opening the door its full width. “Even a bit early. Here, sign your name on the next blank line, then you can go have a seat in the house. They’ll be starting in about, oh”—she pulls her cell phone out of a hidden pocket in her skirt to check the time. (No one wears watches anymore, thinks Mia. When did that happen? And how do these white girls grow dreadlocks? The world sped by while she was driving carpools and stuffing goody bags with landfill. Girls who weren’t even born when she was graduating college now have dreadlocks, nose rings, jobs,
sex
. . . )—“seven minutes or so. Did you bring your head shot and résumé?”

“Oh, Jiminy,” says Clay, ad-libbing. “I think we left them on the desk back at home. You want me to run back and—”

“That’s okay,” says the gatekeeper. “You can just drop them by after the audition. They’ll be here until ten. Then tomorrow they’re casting the males from two until eight. Here . . .” She hands Mia a photocopy of a monologue from the pile of papers stacked under the audition list. Mia sees the character’s name and the first few lines of dialogue and recognizes the passage immediately: It’s the climax of
A Doll’s House
, toward the end of Act III, after Torvald reveals his true self, and Nora suddenly realizes she’s been raising three children with a stranger. “It’s the first play of the season. The director says you don’t have to be off book. Just familiarize yourself with the lines before you go up.”

“Oh, she’s been off book on that one for
years
,” says Clay, with a wink. Then he grabs Mia by the arm. “Come on, darlin’. Your destiny awaits.”

“Such a drama queen, isn’t he?” Mia mock-confides to the clipboard girl, rolling her eyes, really getting into the part.

“As if,” says Clay, in the queeniest faux-outburst he can muster.

“I just guard the door,” says Clipboard Girl, uninterested. “But I’m sure if you say she’ll be great, she’ll be great.” She plops down on her sad metal stool and reopens the paperback she’d been reading before they interrupted her. “Oh, and I’d drop the drawl before you go up there, if I were you,” she calls out over her shoulder, with what sounds to Mia’s sensitive ear like condescension. “The play takes place in Norway, not Nashville.”

To which Mia, switching seamlessly to the Long Island accent she’s worked hard to erase, flings it right back: “Oh my Gawd. Of course. I would never dream of doing Nora as a southern belle,” which throws Clipboard Girl for a loop she quickly chalks up to the absurdity of old people and actors. She wants to be a director when she graduates. Or maybe a political activist. Guarding this door is her penance for having parents who were more concerned with gold faucets than they were about paying their daughter’s tuition. She’s reading Simone de Beauvoir for the first time, which, she’ll later tell her musician boyfriend, is rocking her world even harder than Weber. It will be years before she’s able to look back on this period from her small, cluttered cubicle at WomenWork International and realize how exciting it all was, how full of new ideas and promise, despite the lost hours guarding doors.

“You are bad,” Clay whispers in Mia’s ear.

“You are worse,” she whispers back. Then she breathes in, deeply. “Oh my God, take a whiff,” she says. The lobby of the Loeb smells exactly as Mia remembers: slightly musty, like violin rosin mixed with charcoal ash and baked muffin. But the somewhat drab aesthetic of the building itself, though well maintained with Harvard dollars, surprises her. In her mind, over the years, the Loeb transmogrified from dark, austere minimalism into glowing, rococo nirvana. Or maybe that’s just the feeling she gets whenever she remembers being inside it. Or maybe she’s confusing one of the more gilded sets for the actual architecture of the building. Anyway, she thinks, it was never the brick and mortar of the place that sucked her in. It was the stage. “Let’s shmy around for a little while,” she says to Clay, “but we better get out of here before they call my name.”

“Excuse me, ‘shmy’?”

“It’s Yiddish for, well, I think some sort of a combination of checking things out and snooping. My grandmother would know for sure, but she’s dead.”

“Ah, yes. Death.
So
inconvenient. I like
shmy
. I’ll steal it. How do I use it in a sentence? Can I say, ‘Lady, let’s shmy!’?”

“No. You can’t just shmy. You shmy
around
. And no offense, but it sounds wrong in that accent.”

“Oh yeah? How ’bout old English? My Lady, doth thou wish to shmy? Or wilt thou be having thy bagel with a shmear?”

Mia has to work hard to keep a straight face. “Oy gevalt, my Lord. You are incorrigible.”

“Forsooth!” Clay takes Mia’s arm and links it in his. Then he bends his knees down, then up, down then up. “Schlemiel! Schlimazel! Hasenpfeffer Incorporated!” He hums the first few bars of the
Laverne & Shirley
theme song then pushes open the house doors, and Mia lets loose her giggles, but then the two grow instantly silent the moment they enter the theater. They stand there in the aisle, taking in the empty stage, the ghosts of productions past, the sloping vista of spring-loaded seats, all resting in the up position save for those pushed down by the rear ends of Nora hopefuls and by a handful of those wielding the power to choose one over the others. A few heads turn when they make their way down the aisle and claim two seats in one of the back rows, but most of the women are intently studying their monologues, mouthing the words to themselves, gesturing to invisible Torvalds.

“Wow,” whispers Mia, for lack of the proper language to describe that rush of emotion she imagines one is supposed to feel upon entering a house of worship, which has only ever struck her in this place. Clay grabs her hand over the armrest; she laces her fingers into his and gives them a small squeeze.

“I know,” says Clay. “Back in the belly of the beast. Awesome, isn’t it? Plus I’m going to get to see you do Nora again. How cool is that?”

“Right,” Mia whispers to him. “As if I’d ever go up there.”

“You will if I make you.” Clay smiles mischievously, his gaze resting on the stage, already imagining it.

“Clay, whatever you’re scheming, you better stop it right now. Seriously. I haven’t auditioned in years. It’s not even an option.”

“Come on, Mia, I bet you still know that monologue cold. Just do it. For shits and giggles.”

“Let me see, how do I put this politely? No fucking way. Not for shits and giggles, not for them, and not for you.” She says this with the adamancy of a woman who cannot only conjure, as if it were yesterday, the painful sting of professional rejection but also one whose breasts are growing heavier with milk by the second. She wishes she’d thought to stick the manual pump in her purse. “Anyway, I have to go back to Jane’s to feed Zoe before I explode. I mean, look at me. I’m like Barbarella here.”

“And here I was thinking you went and got yourself a boob job,” says Clay, unselfconsciously reaching out to cop a feel of Mia’s breasts in the way only a gay man or a close girlfriend is allowed to do. “Hot dang, lady, those are some crazy big tits.”

“Tell me about it,” she says. “I told Jonathan he should enjoy them while he can because they’ll shrink back down to nothing after I’m done nursing.” Then she suddenly thinks: and so will I. Followed by: this was a bad idea, coming here. And then: crazy schizophrenic Lytton was right. I had all the tools, and I didn’t use them. When she actually stops to think about these things, it plunges her into despair. She’s trained herself, over the years, to relegate such feelings of failure into the back corners of her mind, but sometimes they find a secret passageway around the wall and spill out along the edges, like smoke. “Look, let’s just sit here and watch one or two of the auditions, and then we’re out of here, okay? I have to get back.”