Without You: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and the Musical Rent (32 page)

“How you doing, honey?” she asked.

“Okay,” I said. And it seemed to be true. If anything, I felt a little numb around the edges, and even a little remote, but basically I was clear and present and, for the moment at least, at peace. “Thanks again for doing this.”

“Oh, honey, I’m honored, truly.”

I had become the de facto emcee, so when everyone was seated I took to the microphone and began.

“Um, thank you everyone for coming to this,” I said, feeling less self-conscious than I thought I might in front of Mom’s family, who looked up at me with a strange mixture of passivity and expectancy. I took a deep breath. “We want this to be kind of informal and everything. Some of us have prepared some things to say, but when we’re done with our part, please feel free to share whatever you’d like.” After witnessing the reluctance of everyone in Mom’s family to say anything at Grandpa’s funeral, I wasn’t sure how well they would do at this today, but I retained some hope that they would rise to the occasion. I continued, “Mom asked me to sing, so I’d like to do that first.”

I had originally planned to sing only “Waiting for the Light to Shine,” as I’d discussed with Mom, but I’d also decided recently to sing “Without You,” and I’d worked up a version of it with Beverly. I looked to her at the piano, and she began the introduction’s lovely and mournful arpeggios, and I sang. As I stood there in the sunlight, singing for my mother and the people who loved her who had gathered here, I felt like a conduit for the clarity and simplicity and beauty of Jonathan’s words and music. I had anticipated having to contend with a closing up of my throat as I sang, but it didn’t come; instead, I continued to sing freely and strongly.

After the piano’s last note gently subsided, Adam read a poem he’d written years before, which Mom had requested he recite today, and Rachel and Anne read prepared speeches. Anne’s voice rang out strongly, and she impressed me with her uninhibited, fearless presence, her eyes meeting ours as she spoke in a direct address to Mom.

“I guess I’m a lot like you,” was her touching refrain. She and Mom had often been at odds, and Mom had worked hard to bridge the gaps that existed between them, so to hear Anne likening herself to Mom now struck me as a generous acceptance on her part, a final peace offering.

When Anne was done I opened up the floor to anyone else who wanted to contribute, and Grandma was the first to take the microphone. I wondered what she would manage to say on this day that her eldest child was being remembered. I was happy that she was taking the opportunity to say something, but I hoped it wasn’t going to include a lot of talk about sin and hell and heaven and her Catholic God. This was, after all, the secular part of the day’s events.

“I was always very proud of Mary Lee,” she began, her voice more subdued than normal, her eyes downcast, but her proud face tilted up into the sunlight. “She was my firstborn and always managed to live her life with a very strong will and a lot of determination. I saw her raise her three children by herself, never complaining about the hardships she faced, and then I saw her face this illness with courage and grace. She never failed to make me proud of her.”

As she continued, I kept waiting for her to say she loved her daughter, but that one word, “love,” remained unspoken. It seemed unbelievable that she didn’t—or couldn’t—say it, but I was glad that she had at least spoken.

Dad made his way to the microphone then. I was proud of him for braving the potentially hostile eyes and ears of some of the members of the Baird clan, not to mention those of Anne and Adam, but if they were unhappy that he was there they didn’t show it overtly. He deserved the opportunity to pay his respects just as much as anyone else.

“Thanks for the chance to say something,” he began, shifting from one foot to the other, one hand in his pocket. “I met Mary quite a few years ago now, as many of you know, and then of course we were married and had our three wonderful children together…” He searched for words. “I learned a lot from Mary,” he said. I hadn’t heard him say anything like that before. “I learned about love and commitment, and even though we weren’t able to make our relationship work, I always admired her so much and knew what a remarkable woman she was…” His face clouded over, and tears sprang to his eyes, which he quickly covered with his free hand. “Uh…” he said. “She was a gentle and kind woman and a wonderful mother to our children, and, uh, thank you for letting me speak.”

I was touched by his sentiments and his courage. I wondered if Anne and Adam were merely tolerating his presence, or grateful for what he said.

A couple of other friends and family members spoke, and then I closed the proceedings by singing “Waiting for the Light to Shine.” Again, my throat remained clear and open. As I sang, I hoped that today had been a suitable memorial for Mom. So much of her spirit had departed, bit by bit, well before her body had ceased functioning, and her death had been so long in coming, that we were ready to lay her to rest now. We were all ready to begin, at last, the long process of moving on.

F
or myself, moving on began with going back home to New York, which I did the next day, but not until after Adam, Anne, and I shared a ceremonial Scrabble mini-tournament. As we sat around Anne’s kitchen table shuffling through our tiles, searching for our best moves and most impressive words, I wanted to ask my siblings how they were feeling, whether they were experiencing the disorienting mixture of relief and exhaustion and peace and guilt and love and sadness and freedom that I was experiencing. But the words caught in my throat. It was precisely the kind of question we had never asked each other, not ever, for any reason. Why? And why was I still abiding by our unspoken rule not to go there? After all, it wasn’t that long ago, on the night I had flailed and ranted at Adam, that he and I had communicated openly. But the door seemed to have closed.

During our game, Todd, who had accompanied us to Anne’s house at my request, but who had opted out of the game, sat sullenly in the next room, reading. Or trying to read. I could feel his impatience and anxiety building, even without seeing him—his sighs and groans had become audible—but I ignored him, resenting him for not being able to just be there and hang out while we played our game, which he knew was an important ritual. At one point, he got up and leaned in the doorway and whined, “How much longer are you guys going to play?”

I clamped down on my rising irritation and said as calmly as I could, “I’m not sure, we’re going to play a couple of games. They take a while.” I glanced at my brother and sister to see if they were picking up on our tension; I didn’t want to argue with him in front of them.

“I should have just stayed at your house,” he said. “Why can’t you take me back there?”

The house was a twenty-minute drive in each direction. There was no
way
I was about to leave for all that time, in the middle of our game. “I’ll take you home when we’re done,” I said, still trying to maintain my calm. Todd sighed and rubbed his eyes and skulked back into the other room. I resisted my urge to follow him and grab him and shake him and scream at him until he just got off my
back
and let me spend some time with my brother and sister whose
mother
had just died, and this was the time we had to spend with each other and this was how we dealt with that time, this was what we did in our
family,
and maybe it was ridiculous that our family couldn’t do anything at moments like this but play a fucking board game, but it was
my family
and if he wanted to be with me then he had to accept us and how we managed our lives and why couldn’t he just grow the fuck
up
and leave me the fuck
alone
???

My cheeks reddened as I reached in the Scrabble bag and pulled out fresh tiles. Anne and Adam and I finished our games quietly, except when Anne and I had to challenge Adam’s usual attempts at playing invented words, at which point we all laughed at how silly he thought we were that we would accept “tumiscal” or “jumbation” or some other concoction, without a fight.

“Adam, you’re nuts,” Anne would say every time.

“You’re just jealous,” he’d reply, his eyes glinting. And Anne and I would share a knowing chuckle as we removed his errant letters from the board.

And just as quietly—with a hasty hug and a muted goodbye—Adam and I left Anne’s house (with a sullen Todd in tow) and flew back home.

Back in New York, Todd and I continued our circular fights, which included a rehashing of why the hell I had stranded him at my sister’s house so I could play a fucking game. I had hoped that Mom’s passing would alleviate our stress, but it didn’t. Maybe he had hoped the same thing, too. I was in constant turmoil to decide whether to break up with him, but I always panicked at the thought of being alone now, and I told myself that his capacity for sweetness, which had shown itself periodically throughout our time together, would carry the day in the end, and all of our struggles would be worth it.

I also couldn’t bear to end yet another relationship, leading to yet another person out in the world resenting me, after having split up with Keith and David and Marcus. I needed to prove to myself that I could make a relationship work, that I didn’t have to run away when things got difficult, as my father had.

As relieved as I was at having to endure no more uncertainty over Mom’s condition, I was also spent, and a couple of weeks after my return, I asked for a week’s vacation from the show, which the producers kindly granted. Todd had to be in LA for writing meetings, where he was getting put up in a free hotel room, so I figured I should just head out there with him. I had friends in LA, and it was an escape from my daily grind. Not that I liked LA much; I found its clichés—shallow, pretty people driving expensive cars; too much traffic; never-ending rays of impossibly bright sunshine—to be entirely accurate and distasteful. But LA was near the water, and the thought of spending at least a little bit of time by the ocean appealed to me.

On one of our first nights there, I drove to Santa Monica by myself and took a nice long walk on the beach. Mom had come to LA with me a couple of times when I was a kid, for screen tests and auditions, but we’d never made it to the beach together. The one time that I was aware of her being at the Pacific Ocean was in San Francisco when I was eleven, while we were traveling with the national tour of
The King and I.
That ruggedly beautiful beach was rocky and windy and the water was freezing, but she had enjoyed it, and I thought she would also have enjoyed the sandy beaches of Southern California. Maybe I was wrong, though, because I didn’t recall Mom ever going on about wanting or needing to return to the ocean on either coast. But something about taking a walk in her honor made sense.

As I strolled along in the lovely, gentle breeze, basking in the orange and peach and violet sunset, listening to the mild and steady rhythm of the surf, I thought Mom would have loved it as much as I did. I didn’t care if I was blithely reaching for a meaningful moment that didn’t exist; during the hour or so that I spent out there, I felt very close to my mother indeed.

Michael Greif was currently in La Jolla, a couple of hours’ drive south of LA, rehearsing the California company of
Rent,
so I decided to drop in on him. Todd was busy with his work, which was fine with me; we needed some time away from each other. Though our fights had lessened a little bit since the trip had begun, I could never trust which Todd I’d be dealing with—the patient, kind, open, easygoing Todd, or the distrustful, jealous, nagging, needy, neurotic Todd. His jealousy had been driving me mad for a while now. While I had been faced with many opportunities to be unfaithful, with so many people paying me so much attention in the spotlight of
Rent
’s success, the truth was that I hadn’t even tried to kiss anyone, as tempted as I had sometimes been. It was a heady experience to come out of the stage door at the Nederlander and face any number of adorable and sexy young men (and the occasional adorable and sexy young woman), some of whom openly flirted with me. But I had made a commitment to Todd to be monogamous—at his request—and I had been proud to honor that commitment.

Not that Todd ever really trusted me. Word would get back to him that I had looked someone in the eye as I talked to them outside the Nederlander (and, truthfully, I may or may not have been flirting by doing so; it depended on the person), and he would grill me.

“Who was it? Did you give him your phone number? Am I going to have to worry about you two?” he’d say.

“I don’t even know which person it might have been, Todd,” I’d reply, avoiding the phone number question, because there had been times in which numbers had been exchanged. “And just because I looked someone in the eye doesn’t mean I wanted to fuck them.” (Which was only sometimes true.) “And no, I didn’t give him my phone number,” (again, only sometimes true) “and no, you have nothing to worry about. People are going to think that I want to fuck them just because I talked to them, Todd, that comes with the territory, you have to know that.”

“But why do you have to talk to everybody all the time?”

“Because it’s important to me,” I said. “I never wanted to feel like I couldn’t connect with the people who appreciated my work. I never wanted to feel untouchable or something.” Which was true, but it was also true that I enjoyed the attention and occasional flirtation.

“Well, you sure have a knack for making me feel special,” he said.

“Oh, give me a fucking break. How many more ways do I have to show you how much I love you? I can’t ever prove I’m not doing anything, I can only tell you that I’m not.”

“Oh, that’s reassuring as hell.”

“God, Todd, it’s like I’m on trial or something. Seriously, what the fuck can I do? I can only tell you, I can only swear on my mother’s grave, that I’m not doing anything. With
anybody.”

But these conversations never seemed to alleviate his anxiety or dampen his jealousy, and I came to feel as though I had to police my every thought while I talked to any fan or glanced at some hot guy on the street or even dreamed about someone else, for fear that somehow I was being unfaithful.

So it was a relief to have some time alone on the long car ride to La Jolla. I was looking forward to reconnecting with Michael, and I was curious about how this new cast was shaping up.

I made my way onto the campus of the University of California in San Diego, where the La Jolla Playhouse produced their shows, and wandered into the rehearsal room. The cast was in the midst of a run-through of Act Two, just beginning to line the edge of the stage for the reprise of “I’ll Cover You.” How apropos, I thought. Another funeral. Michael quietly waved me over and gave me a hug. I sat and took in this cast, all of them attractive and with huge voices and a lot of energy. It was surreal, however, to see a whole new group of people singing these songs and embodying these characters. But they approached the work with heart and commitment.

When they were done with the run-through, Michael announced my presence. I reddened as I waved hello, and one by one they came up to shake my hand and chat. It was strange, as though I were an elder statesman, but I enjoyed the opportunity to impart some wisdom here and there and to have a glimpse of their process.

After rehearsal, some of the members of the cast joined Michael and me for a bite to eat at a local Italian restaurant. I sat next to a cast member named Andy, whom I found to be adorable, but I couldn’t tell if he felt the same way, so I kept my flirting to a minimum. As we were leaving, I offered a ride home to anyone who needed one, and he was the only person who took me up on it, so I thought the feeling might be mutual.

Even though I had never cheated on Todd, I longed to know if my attraction to certain people was returned. Knowing whether the feeling was mutual might satisfy some of my urge to go further. But I didn’t ever ask anyone for fear that it would get back to Todd, or that I might tempt fate.

So during the brief drive from the restaurant to Andy’s apartment complex, I fought back the desire to ask him head-on how he felt about me. Instead, I made idle chat.

“So, are you having a good time in the show?” I asked him.

“Yeah, it’s really wonderful.”

“Are you getting to be friends with the other cast members?”

“Yeah, some of them, especially. We’re becoming like a family, you know?”

“I do.”

I glanced over at him as I drove, wondering if he was doing the same while I wasn’t looking. But soon enough we reached his destination, and he gave me a brief hug good night and went upstairs, and I drove off to my hotel room alone.

I had become an e-mail junkie over the past year, answering as much of my fan mail as I could, and striking up a few lovely friendships with some of the early enthusiasts of the show via AOL. E-mail had also served as an easy distraction from the reality of my mom’s illness. And now that she was gone and the waiting was over, the last thing I wanted to do was sit in a strange hotel room in silence, alone with my thoughts; I had to keep finding ways to occupy myself. So as soon as I sat on my hotel room bed, I popped open my laptop and signed on to the annoyingly familiar generic male voice proclaiming, “Welcome! You’ve got mail!” and I opened up my inbox to discover an e-mail from Andy.