The Red Book (26 page)

“Okay,” says Clay. “I won’t push it.”

“Thank you.” She squeezes his hand once more as the first woman is called up onstage.

“Too young.” Clay dismisses her immediately, before a word even exits her mouth.

He’s right, Mia thinks. She looks way too young and inexperienced to play Nora. Plus she reads the lines as if they were invective, not inner thought transformed into outward epiphany. Nora is disappointed with her husband, but she’s not as angry at him as she is furious at herself for blindly, unquestioningly accepting his worldview as her own. When she tells her husband “
It is your fault that I have made nothing of my life
,” she is both accusing Torvald of malfeasance as well as castigating herself. The monologue demands subtlety as well as an understanding of the historical context in which it was written, when women could not sign for loans, when slamming the door on one’s family was so shocking for certain audiences, Ibsen was forced to provide an alternative ending when the play was staged in Germany. The monologue also requires at least a passing grasp of the sometimes untenable and universal compromises of marriage, no matter the era.

Mia understood all this back in college, despite her own youth and inexperience, simply by virtue of having gestated in the acid womb of Stella Mandelbaum. She and her brother were continually sucking from the tit of their mother’s malaise. Mia vowed to be a different kind of maternal presence in the lives of her own children, and in most respects she upheld those vows with aplomb. Okay, so sometimes she loses her temper and sounds eerily like her mother, but unlike her mother, she immediately regrets her bad behavior and begs her children and husband for forgiveness. No one’s perfect. At the very least, she’s done an excellent job at hiding her own failures and disappointments from her sons.

When Max recently asked her, point-blank, whether she regretted giving up her career after he was born, she gave the boilerplate answer she gives to everyone: “Max, I just had to face the fact that I was not beautiful enough to be a movie star. Plus I didn’t want to miss a single moment with you.” Both of these statements were true, and yet taken together, they were also little better than a bad fib. Had she been offered good parts, she has no doubt she would have taken them. And while she originally
thought
she didn’t want to miss out on a single moment with her children, the minute they were all off in school, she was relieved to have a piece of herself back, even if that “self” found itself filling the hours not in front of an audience but shopping for food, going to the gym, volunteering at her sons’ school, running errands, straightening the house, stuffing envelopes for various causes, and reading the paper from end to end.

But now that Zoe is here, a convenient chapter two, she finds herself back in the trenches of hands-on mothering, which leaves her too busy, too tired, and too emotionally frazzled to imagine what the next chapter of her life’s saga might look like, although she’s certain it will not include more babies. For one, her knees and back couldn’t take it. For another, she’s not enjoying full-time motherhood as much this time around. Or rather, she is enjoying her time alone with baby Zoe a thousand times more than she did with her first three (painfully aware, with the benefit of hindsight, both of how ephemeral it all is and of how little she actually needs to worry about first steps, first teeth, first carrots and peas), but whereas she once gleefully sought out the company of other mothers like a magnet to paper clips, she has now become the kind of mother who repels the others with her utter indifference. In fact, when it came time to sign up Zoe for Gymboree, Mia couldn’t pull the trigger. The thought of sitting shoeless in a circle of sleep-deprived sybarites while some failed actress blew thousands of tiny and perversely unpoppable bubbles into their single-process-treated hair made Mia so depressed, she broke her 6
P.M.
rule and had a glass of Chardonnay with lunch.

The most grounded women she knows—not the happiest, she’s not naïve enough to buy into the notion of steady, continual happiness, since “happy” describes a state that is unpredictable and evanescent for everyone, no matter how comfortable they are in their own skin, but she digresses—have careers that allow them to have a steady foot in both worlds, work and home, on a sliding scale and ratio set according to their individual emotional and financial needs. Before she had a daughter, she didn’t really worry much about the fact that her sons never saw her earning a paycheck. But ever since Zoe was born, she’s felt a nagging responsibility to set a good example. Never mind that she’s worried, for the first time in her married life, about her family’s finances.

She has no idea what the actual numbers are—Jonathan handles everything money-related, including taking out the weekly wads of cash from the ATM for the housekeeper and the gardeners and the nanny—but recently, when the monthly AmEx bill came lumbering in at well over $78,000 (she’d replaced the lawn furniture and the boys’ laptops and bought a new sofa and a couple of light fixtures and a few cashmere sweaters for the baby and an espresso machine, nothing major, but still, it added up), Jonathan had, unusually, thrown a fit. “Cashmere? For a six-month-old? Jesus Christ, Mia, we can’t keep bleeding cash like this!” he’d snapped. But every time she asks him for a clearer picture of their financial health, especially now with their portfolio in what she overheard their accountant Stan Shipley describe as “a fucking tailspin,” Jonathan always says, “Don’t worry. I’ve got it covered. We’re fine.”

It’s crazy! Mia thinks. I have the right to sign a loan, the right to earn money, and yet here I am in 2009, no better off than Nora. She decides she will bring this up with Jonathan tonight, after the reunion dinner. And she will no longer accept “I’ve got it covered” for an answer. It’s absurd for her not to know the most basic facts about their financial well-being. No, worse than that. It’s wrong, and it’s embarrassing, and if Jonathan balks, she’ll call Shipley herself.

The director interrupts Nora #1 in the middle of the monologue with a “thank you very much,” which is never a good sign. Nora #2 is called up onstage, and she does a much better job with the tone of the material, except she’s not believable. She doesn’t inhabit the role; the effort of the acting, the nuts and bolts of it are too visible. Also, her sense of timing is off. The words flow out of her mouth with a syncopation that feels jarring, such that when she recites the line “
I have existed merely to perform tricks for you
,” she places odd pauses after both
existed
and
merely
, which makes her sound less like a human and more like those computer programs that mimic the human voice.

“Next,” whispers Clay as the director says, “Thank you very much,” nearly simultaneously.

Mia’s breasts have become rock hard. She’ll have to pump an ounce or two before Zoe nurses, just to allow the nipple to have a bit of give and elasticity for the latch. At the mere thought of her daughter, she feels her milk letting down and, yup (she fixes her gaze on the two nipple-size, nipple-located stains on her blouse, shit), leaking out. When Jonathan once asked her what letdown feels like, she told him it’s the chest-area equivalent to the onset of crying, when you can feel the liquid pooling behind the eyes before they emerge. “Come on,” Mia says to Clay, about to stand up. “Look at me. I’m a frigging mess here. I’ve got to get back.”

He stares at the stains on her blouse, unfazed. “Oh, please, you know what they say.”

“Huh?”

“Don’t cry over spilt milk.” Clay grabs hold of her arm, urging her to sit back down. “I’m loving this. Aren’t you loving this? Isn’t this fun? Stay a few more minutes with me. Pretty please?”

Yes, she thinks, it is fun. I am loving it. I want to stay. “I should go.” The third Nora is called, but no one stirs or appears on stage. “Andrea Krull?” the director shouts a second time, and then another voice shouts out, “I think she just went to the bathroom,” and before it dawns on Mia that hers was the next name on that list, the director is now shouting, “Mia? Mia Zane?”

“Go!” whispers Clay. “Come on, just do it.”

“No way!” Mia says, a little too loudly, and now everyone is turned in their direction.

“Ms. Zane?” says the director. “Please, everyone, we don’t have all day.” Now he stands up and addresses the theater at large. “Look, this is an open call. Our new A.D. wanted it this way, to shake things up around here, but it also means we’ve got a tight schedule and many Noras to see between now and this evening, so when your name is called, please be ready, and for God’s sake, if you have to use the ladies’ room, please do so now, not three minutes before your audition. Ms. Zane? Are you ready to go up?”

And here’s where Mia Zane’s sense of guilt, shame, and propriety prove, once again, victors over rationality. Why can’t she just say,
No, I’m sorry, there’s been a big mistake
? Because she can’t. And because, yes, she has to admit, a tiny or maybe even a medium-size part of her might actually
want
to go up there and show these young Noras how it’s done, never mind her age, postpartum jelly roll of a stomach, and milk-stained blouse. In fact, Clay’s right. To hell with the stains. There’s never been any use in crying over spilt milk. And there’s no use lamenting the lost years. “Yes,” she says, standing up. “I’m ready.” She turns to Clay and mouths, “I’m going to kill you,” but she doesn’t really mean it, and he knows it.

Clay stands up and hugs her, hard. Her breasts feel like giant boulders between them. Then he whispers in her ear, “Zane, go show these bitches how it’s done.”

Mia walks down the aisle toward the stage completely lost in her head, in the type of memory and deliberation that wipe out peripheral vision. If there were a camera following her—being married to a director, she often imagines her life as a film, albeit one that, until just this minute, has been more boring than she imagined it would have been, given the previews—it would be mounted on a dolly, shooting one of those long tracking shots where the focal length and background change dramatically while the human figure stays the same size. She forces herself to concentrate on her breathing, on getting into character. It’s been two decades since she slammed the door on that stage.

It’s about fucking time she opened it.

Now she’s finally standing on the proscenium, sweating under the lights, the harsh white spot blinding her to any one person or object in the audience. Good, she thinks. She doesn’t want to see anyone. She imagines Clay in the back row, cheering her on. She pictures him as Torvald, pathetic Torvald, standing in front of her twenty years earlier. She’s about to begin when she hears the director yell, “Wait, where are your sides?” Then to the room at large, once more, the frustration in his voice palpable as he says, “Please, people, before you step up on that stage, make sure you have your sides with you.”

“That’s okay, I’m fine without them,” says Mia. An earlier glance at the monologue was all she needed to realize the sentences are in her, as clear as they were the day she first performed them. Certain passages are just like that, permanently etched into her memory: the balcony scene from
Romeo and Juliet
; Hedda Gabler’s line about courage, how if only one had it, then “life might be livable, in spite of everything.” She closes her eyes for a brief moment and begins. “
It is perfectly true, Torvald
,” she says. “
When I was at home with Papa, he told me his opinion about everything, and so I had the same opinions; and if I differed from him, I concealed the fact, because he would not have liked it. He called me his doll child . . .”
She feels the words rushing out of her now with the same inevitable insistence as the milk now surging out of her breasts in thick rivulets, the thrill of the former wiping out the shame of the latter. It is a scene the director will describe in the coming years, with ever increasing exaggeration, again and again: the middle-aged woman, he can’t remember her name, some alum at her twentieth reunion who snuck into the audition, clearly too old for the part but so damned good and so impassioned in her delivery that “her breasts were, like, spraying milk all over the fucking stage, and I mean: All. Over. The fucking stage.”

“
I have existed merely to perform tricks for you, Torvald,
” Mia continues, slumping down on a wooden block that’s been painted black, the only prop on the stage. Then, with growing strength and conviction, she stands up once more to deliver the final sting of words with the perfect mix of potency and defeat. “. . .
it was then that it dawned upon me that for eight years I had been living here with a strange man, and had borne him three children
.” A few gasps can be heard in the audience, and Mia knows she has them in her grip, and now she sees her way free and clear to the finale. Taking a small but deliberate step forward, addressing an empty spot on the horizon—herself; God; the audience; whomever—she holds one hand to her heart and lets it rip: “
Oh! I can’t bear to think of it! I could tear myself into little bits!
”

Clay jumps up out of his seat and begins to clap wildly, which causes a few others to clap along with him. “Now that’s what I’m talking about!” he says. “Brava, Mia! Way to knock it out of the fucking ballpark.”

Mia shushes him with a finger to her lips and rolls her eyes at his show of enthusiasm, but she also knows the outburst was not false. She deserves it. All of it. Or at least more of it. Jesus, what was she thinking? So she’ll never be a Hollywood star. Who gives a shit? There are plenty of opportunities in LA to do theater. Why hasn’t she taken them? Dear God, she thinks. I’ve lost so many years.

(She can’t bear to think of it. She could tear herself into little bits.)

The director stands up and addresses Mia. “Excellent job, Ms.”—he looks down at his list for her name—“Zane, truly excellent. But if you don’t mind my asking, since I don’t have a copy of your résumé here, what stage were you last on?”