WILD AGAIN
Kathrin King Segal
A Bucket List Book
Praise for Wild Again
"An erotic thriller which sets new moral boundaries."—Abilene Reporter-News
"A story of urban and moral decay as accurate and disturbing as Bonfire of the Vanities."—Nelson DeMille
"An engaging story ... Segal knows the Big Apple milieu well....she has written an involving tale."—New Bedford Standard Times
"Segal can write!"—South Bend Tribune
With this poignant and powerful novel, Kathrin King Segal gives vivid focus to the dynamic of the early 1990's. The world of Art and Margo—at once glittering and crumbling, meaningful and hedonistic, and inescapably dangerous—emerges as a microcosm of contemporary urban life.
First electronic edition
Previously published by Dutton (hardcover) and Onyx (paperback)
Copyright © Kathrin King Segal, 1991
New edition: Bucket List Books, 2011
ISBN: 9780983518105
Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint the following:
Excerpt from "Song for the Last Act" from The Blue Estuaries by Louise Bogan. Copyright © 1949 by Louise Bogan: Renewal copyright © 1976 by Maidie Alexander Scannell. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc.
Excerpt from "Pictures of a Gone World" from Lawrence Ferlinghetti: A Coney Island of the Mind, Copyright © 1958 by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation. World rights.
Excerpt from "Beyond the Sea" English lyric by Jack Lawrence. Music and French lyric by Charles Trenet © 1945 Editions Raoul Breton. © Renewed 1973 Charles Trenet, © 1947 T.B. Harms. © Renewed 1975 MPL Communications, Inc. International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved.
Excerpt from "One for My Baby (And One More for the Road)" Lyric by Johnny Mercer Music by Harold Arlen. © 1943 Harwin Music Co. © Renewed 1971 Harwin Music Co. International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved.
Excerpt from "La Chanson des Vieux Amants" (Jacques Brel, Gerard Jouannest in © 1969 Pouchenel, Editions. All rights administered by Unichappell Music Inc. All Rights Reserved. Used By Permission.
Excerpt from "Send in the Clowns" © 1973 Stephen Sondheim. Revelation Music Publishing Corp/Rilting Music Inc. A Tommy Valando Publication. Title "Pretty Women" a 1978 Stephen Sondheim. Revelation Music Publishing Corp/Rilting Music Inc. A Tommy Valando Publication.
All rights reserved.
PUBLISHER'S NOTE
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's, imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Now that I have your voice by heart, I read
In the black chords upon a dulling page
Music that is not meant for music's cage,
Whose emblems mix with words that shake
and bleed.
The staves are shuttled over with a stark
Unprinted silence. In a double dream
I must spell out the storm, the running
stream.
The beat's too swift. The notes shift in the
dark.
—Louise Bogan, "Song for the Last Act-"
The world is a beautiful place
to be born into
If you don't mind happiness
not always being
so very much fun
if you don't mind a touch of hell
now and then
just when everything is fine
because even in heaven they don't sing
all
the
time
—Lawrence. Ferlinghetti, "Pictures of a Gone World"
for Steve
PROLOGUE
He had done some terrible thing and now he was lost.
Pivoting to the right, he pushed his hand out into black space to regain his balance and grasped leaves, palm-fronds. The moon slid out from behind a cloud and he began to see where he was, high atop a hill overlooking the island. He heard the dull throbbing of his heart and knew, just then, that a heart did not so much break as shatter, like a car window crystallizing on impact.
It felt as if the nightmare had been going on forever, but it was only a matter of days since he had stood over her lifeless body and felt his world tilt. Yet his flight from that world had not brought him peace or safety and had only driven him to run again. He stood still in the dark-tropical night, willing his heart to slow its painful beating, and tried to focus his mind. He was just beginning to feel calmer when he heard the distant cold howling, a long drawn-out cry that was both animal and. human, as if all the loss and loveless pain of the world had beers given a pure, aching voice.
1
Art placed the brandy glass on top of the piano and thrust a five-dollar bill into it, to give customers the right idea. Balancing a lit cigarette on the ashtray, he flexed his fingers, hands poised over the gleaming keys. He took a deep breath of boozy, smoky air and played the first chords to his jazzy arrangement of "Always," then segued into "Always on My Mind" and "All Alone." After almost two years of playing four hours a night, when he showed up, he used tricks to keep himself interested, like selecting his songs alphabetically. At least that way if he lost track of the time and he was playing "Younger than Springtime," he'd know the night was nearly over.
It was a little after ten and the crowd at Jack's Cafe-Bar was crossing over: the after-work suits clearing out, staggering home to their tiny, overpriced co-ops, and the hipper late-night set arriving, casing the joint with cooler-than-thou deadpan faces.
Owner Jack Brady strode in, half a head taller than anyone else, an Irishman from Brooklyn who still spoke with the streety old neighborhood accent, his nose permanently tilted from ancient brawls. He'd started in the saloon business thirty years before, a bar with a shamrock on a green neon sign, then caught the wave of singles in the late sixties with a hangout on upper First Avenue. When the West Side turned trendy, he opened a second place, added a cocktail pianist, and had it done in peach and chrome and glass, with huge carnivorous-looking plants hanging overhead. The menu, once hearty stews and burger fare from sweaty steam tables and greasy grills, was now a light and expensive mélange of chevre and endive salads, catch of the day, and baked potato skins.
Art could scarcely hear himself as he turned into the microphone to sing the words to "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered." Jack was roaring behind the bar, mixing drinks because he did it faster than the harried bartender, keeping an eye on the front door for unsavories and Bridge and Tunnels.
Art liked to throw in a "Danny Boy" every so often for Jack, and he made a mental note to sing it tonight, when he got to the D's. Jack loved whatever Art sang, which was no compliment really, since Jack admittedly had a tin ear. He just liked listening to the guy play the piano, and the customers kept coming back, so Art Glenn must be doing something right.
Art looked up from the piano and caught Jack's salute, a mock salaam of gratitude for the bar's swarming crowds. Art thought Jack gave him too much credit, that the place would pack 'em in even if there was a performing monkey at a toy piano, because for now Jack's was the hot spot, and next year it would be someplace else. Art used to like it when Jack's was a little less successful and the customers could hear the songs, but he'd quickly gotten over that kind of nostalgia as the tips filled the glass night after night; all that nice, crisp, off-the books cash.
The extra weekend waiter, Desmond, was on tonight, an aspiring singer-dancer who scurried around announcing the specials at his tables as if he were auditioning for an entire Broadway season. Every so often, just before closing, when the only customers left were too strung out to care, Jack persuaded Art to let Desmond sing a few tunes. The kid would excitedly press some tattered sheet music in front of Art and grab the extra microphone.
"Good evening and welcome to Jack's, the crème de la crème on the Upper West Side! Is everybody happy?"
Yeah, sure. Right. Could you bring my order?
"I'm your singing waiter! I sing, you wait!" He'd burst into song, with Art dutifully accompanying, wondering how he’d gotten to this particular place in life.
Playing the piano was something he had picked up by ear as a kid, at first as a game to impress his mother with imitations of the songs she sang.
She was a singer with a perky Teresa Brewer sound who played small hotel lounges and clubs throughout the country. The Big Break was a perpetual carrot luring her ever onward Lila Noone had been born Lottie Lefkowitz in Brooklyn, New York, and left her family's small, neat apartment in Flatbush for the wilds of Manhattan when she was sixteen. She planned to become a star right away and changed her name to Lila Lord, which her family thought was insultingly goyish. She kept auditioning for chorus jobs but didn't have a big enough voice or sufficient skill as a dancer. Instead, she worked as a waitress until she was fired for offending a customer to whom she'd brought the wrong order—Lila had trouble with things like apologies—and took a job posing in negligees for amateur photographers in a rundown Times Square loft. Eventually she hooked up with a lounge band called the Star Five and joined them on the road as their sequin-clad chick singer. By this time she'd been briefly married to Frank E. Noone, an earnest Bronx plumber, and had taken both his name and his baby son with her when she left him.
Art couldn't recall his father in any real sense, and as far as he knew, Frank Noone had never sought him out either. Art's most vivid memory of those early years was of lying on a bed staring at a painting on what must have been some motel-room wall. The picture was just a watercolor of a city skyline, but to him it represented that one place where they might finally come to rest in their perpetual journey.
He was a quirky, good-looking boy, with slightly crooked front teeth and dark-lashed golden-hazel eyes that girls began to call "bedroom" before he knew what they meant. He was awkwardly shy, except when he sat down at the piano. Then he was transformed. He got better and better, finding lots of time to practice while waiting for his mother in countless Starlight Rooms and Peacock Lounges and Eddie's Niteries. The music came pouring out through his fingertips, into poignant renditions of the purest love songs or nervously intense jazz improvisations. He developed a clean singing style, a little Mose Allison warmed by Sinatra.
Art scanned the room as he played, surveying the women. He took a deep drag of his cigarette, a sip of Jack Daniel's, and selected a self-assured streaked blonde who was talking to another woman, less attractive. They were both young, looked like ad-agency slaves who spent the day thinking up annoying commercials people zapped with their remotes. He turned back to the keys. "Blue Skies." "Come Rain or Come Shine." She was looking at him now, as if she'd just discovered he was alive and not an audio-animatronic from Disney World, and he knew how easy it would be. Piano players were so romantic, they all told him.
At “Every Breath You Take" she excused herself to her friend and approached. In a fast-forward mental videotape he lived the night in the time it took her to cross the room: a quick medley of bare skin, the exchange of verbal resumes, textures and scents, and the letdown when he discovered she was not going to resolve his life and that he'd actually have to deal with her. ("Yes, honey, I'll give you a call," keeping the number on a scrap of paper in his pocket until it faded or he couldn't remember whose number it was.) She leaned close, draping herself over the piano to show her cleavage, and promised to wait till the last set was done at two. She was cute enough, her bare shoulder as lickable as a scoop of vanilla Sedutto.
When Art was twelve, his mother had an extended engagement in Cleveland, playing at Forrester's Inn out on the highway that passed by vast Lake Erie. Lila called the town "the mistake on the lake." Cold November winds swept across the parking lot late at night when they climbed into their old white Chrysler for the short drive from the motel to the club, Lila shivering in her glamorous gown beneath a shedding rabbit-fur coat. It took a while for Art to realize that the main reason they were sticking around Cleveland was Charley Forrester, the club's owner. He was a small, thin man who wore plaid sports jackets and was always accompanied by a pair of sleek black Doberman pinschers named Diablo and Diego.
When Art was younger, Lila would put him to bed before she went off to work so that they could do his bedtime routine. Lila would pretend he was still very, very small, hold him in her arms, and recite: "I love you in all the warm and sunny places in the universe. I love you in all the planets and the stars." Art would repeat this back to her until they both dissolved into giggles, Lila would kiss him, turn out the light, and leave.
Somewhere along the way, Art had outgrown the bedtime ritual and he stayed back at the motel trying to keep up with schoolwork from the latest new school. With the TV blaring in the background, he tried to muster up some interest in history and math but found himself more often tapping out tunes with his fingers, wishing there was a piano under them. He liked to go to the club in the late afternoon and play before the place got busy, ignored by the couple of drunk salesmen getting a head start on the night; hookers in pastel miniskirts and hair that ballooned up like cotton-candy poofs before cascading down in ironed sheets.
He'd hang out unobtrusively until it was time for his mother's first set because it was better than staying alone, even though lately she paid more attention to Charley Forrester. He got the feeling that Charley liked to pretend that Lila didn't have a son at all, that maybe she was only twenty-five, and had never been married. She went along with the game, giggling and calling Art her "little brother," one time saying that he was "the drummer's kid" as a joke.
Charley's dogs, Diablo and Diego, frightened Art, growling low whenever he came near. Being on the road so much, Art was unused to dogs or pets of any kind. Once, he'd found a kitten near the Holiday Inn somewhere in Indiana, and he'd snuck it into their room until Lila found out and put it outside again. She didn't like animals in the house, she yelled, especially cats. They were sneaky and you never knew what they were thinking. And also, she added, to mollify him, it wasn't fair to the animal to get it attached when they'd only have to leave it behind. One day, she promised, they'd settle down and have all the animals he could ever want.
It was in Cleveland that Lila started favoring rock songs because she said that was the only way she was going to get a recording contract. And a hit record was the only way she could get off the lounge circuit. Charley, she said, had connections in the music business and was going to help her. So she was doing Beatles medleys and Rolling Stones and Creedence Clearwater Revival, but all that top-forty shit sounded thin and ineffectual when played by the Star Five and sung by "songstress" Lila Noone who'd been raised on the lush pop songs of the forties and fifties. She no longer sang Art's favorites, not even the song that had been he standby for years, "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered."
When the occasional young party came to Forrester's, Art saw them smirking behind their drinks. It made him sad, then angry, that his mother didn't even know what she should be singing, after all these years. There she was, no longer a kid but a slightly overweight woman in her mid-thirties, spilling out of her dress and gushing "Proud Mary" into the microphone. Suddenly he hated her with a rage that took him by surprise.
He got up abruptly and went outside, a blast of icy snow stinging his face, and stayed there for a long time, hearing the set-ending music from the bandstand, and Lila's cheery "We'll be taking a break right now but we'll be right back, so keep on having a happy time!" to the dozen or so straggly customers.
He waited for her to notice he was missing and to come looking for him, but he only go colder and colder. Hurting from it, he went back inside to tell her he was going to call a taxi and go back to the motel. She wasn't at the bar or in the lobby, or at any of the tables where customers often bought her a drink between sets. He slumped down on the hideous floral sofa in the area where people waited to be seated and picked up a drink someone had left there, sucked on a piece of Scotch-tinged ice and waited.
Restless, he got up again and walked into the lobby. As he passed by the door marked "Manager's Office," he stopped. Maybe his mother was in there talking to Charley Forrester. He knocked and walked in.
For a moment he was confused. His mother was kneeling down as if she'd dropped an earring, but Charley wasn't helping her look for it. He was sitting on a chair with his pants undone. They both looked up, faces pink and surprised.
"What the fuck ... ?" said Charley.
The two dogs flanked both sides of the desk, like gargoyles. They stood as one, growling so deep in their throats Art felt more than heard the vibration.
He did not know exactly what had happened except that it was bad and he could see only the glittering black eyes of the dogs. He ran out, his hand over his mouth, and made it to the parking lot, where he threw up everything he'd eaten and drunk that whole day and night.
In a few minutes he felt her hand on his back. He shrugged her off, curling himself into a ball until he could feel the gravel of the parking lot scraping his arms. She leaned closer, crouching down, her long dress in folds around her legs.
"Artie, I know you don't understand, but you will when you're older. Sometimes your mama just gets lonely. You know what I mean, honey? And she needs a friend, a man to help her feel better. And when you're grown up, that means a ... uh ... different kind of thing than when you're a child, and maybe I used bad judgment but it's this crazy life and I know it's my fault but one of these days, when I've got a hit song and we've got our place, you'll forget all about this. And that day, honey, is sooner than you think—"
"No, it isn't." He sat up, the gravel still sticking to his face and hands. He picked it off, one pebble at a time. "No, it is never going to happen the way you say because you're not good enough."
"What?" She sat back, as if struck.
He didn't know where the coldness came from but he heard himself saying the words, like icy stones dropped into a deep pool. "You're never going to have a hit record. You stink! And I hate you and hate you in all the cold icy places in the universe. I'll hate you forever."
He left her sitting on the ground and walked down the driveway to the main road. The world would come to an end soon, he thought. A car pulled up beside him and a stringy young guy rolled down the window and asked if he was Arthur Noone. He nodded. "Well, Forrester sent me to find you and get you back to your motel."
Without a word Art got in the dented Valiant. They drove in silence until they reached the motel, only a few miles down the highway. Art didn't make a move to get out.
"So, this is it, right?" asked the driver.
Art didn't reply.
"I'm Vinnie. I work for Charley Forrester, odd jobs, you know? So listen, you smoke?"
Art shrugged.
Vinnie pulled out a joint and lit up, passed it over to Art. He'd never smoked pot before but he knew what it was, from the guys in the band. He and Vinnie sat in the parking lot, passing it back and forth. The car windows fogged up from their breath and the smoke, until Art couldn't see anything outside except for the blurred light from the motel sign, blinking on and off. The pot didn't do much for him, except make him feel headachy and tired.
After a while, he said good night to Vinnie, got out of the car, and went into the room. Clothes and makeup, books and magazines, his and Lila's, littered the room but he didn't pick anything up. He cleared his bed by sliding everything into a pile on the floor. The only thing on TV after midnight was a preacher signing off with warnings about eternal damnation. Art searched the room's midget refrigerator, finding instant coffee, soured milk, and an opened bottle of flat champagne. He drank it, mixed with ice from the ice machine across the hall and fell asleep in the chair.
He awoke with a start at dawn, alone. His mother had not come back all night. A headache throbbed behind his eyes. The TV murmured "Sunrise Semester." The words to a song floated through his mind, something about a lavender morning but he couldn't recall if he’d heard it or made it up in his dreams. He drifted off again, until a sharp knock on the door startled him out of sleep, his heart pounding.
Years later, when he thought about that night and the hard dawn that followed, changing his life forever, it seemed as if all the events had been something he'd seen in a movie or a television show, a film that had gone blank in the middle, and when he awoke time had jumped and he was on a bus alone heading to New York City. He was nearly thirteen years old and going to live with people he'd never even met, and all he could think about was how long it would be until he was old enough to get away, from all of them.
He stayed awake through the long night bus ride, leafed through a Pittsburgh newspaper some passenger had left behind and read about John Glenn, who had just resigned from the astronaut team. Art had only been four when Glenn orbited the earth, but he saw the picture on television and his mother explained to him that a man was flying around out there in space. Art felt a leap in his body, like in the dreams he often had, where he stepped off a curb and began to soar, higher and higher until he was far above the highways and motels and could see his mother's tired white Chrysler gliding along the road below like a marble.
Art went to live with his mother's elderly parents in their Flatbush apartment. Once he got to New York, exhausted from the bus ride and all that had happened, he thought he recalled being there before, even though he knew he had been an infant at the time and couldn't possibly remember.
His father, Frank Noone, was remarried and had a large family of his own and no interest in the son he'd never seen, by the woman who'd dumped him so long ago.
Gramma Rose and Grampa Morty were perfectly nice people who had little energy left for an adolescent boy. They tried to get him to attend school regularly, something he'd never before experienced and didn't particularly enjoy. He had trouble being in the same place day after day, sitting still and having to pay attention. Every once in a while, when he'd disappointed them again, one would turn to the other and say in a hushed voice, "The apple doesn't fall far from the tree." For a long time he got this mixed up with the story of Adam and Eve.
The grandparents wanted him to go to college, to find a real profession, but he couldn't sit at a desk or in an office. It was only when he played the piano that he really came to life.
He took a sip of Jack Daniel's, a little too diluted from melting ice, but the sharp sweet sting was good, focusing his senses. The faces, noise, smoke swirled around him and he felt a surge of elation, for being alive and pulsing with sexual energy and because he was thirty-two and his hairline showed not the slightest sign of thinning. Okay, so maybe he should be farther along, especially when he thought about Mozart dying at thirty-five, Gershwin at thirty-eight. Of course, lately everyone was dying young, so some of the cachet had worn off. But he was taut and feral and could be anyone he wanted to be. That was why he was Art Glenn and not pathetic little Arthur Noone.
"How's it going, Art?" asked Desmond, brushing by, a tray held aloft.
"Great, kiddo. Could use another of these." He tapped his drink glass.
"Coming right up," Desmond promised. "Listen, I have some friends coming in later. Do you think maybe I could do a couple of songs? Please?"
"Sure, guy," he answered, feeling magnanimous. "Some Wagner, a little Verdi? Manilow?"
"Right." Desmond grinned happily and hurried to the bar to get Art's refill. Art closed out his set and took a break, heading first to the cigarette machine and then to the men's room.
"Arthur, long time, no call." She stopped just outside the door, a petite young woman with short brown hair and wide dark eyes, and he remembered that she had small firm breasts with nipples like little copper pennies. He recalled them but not her name.
"Honey, my schedule's been crazy. Working here. Playing parties. Writing songs. No time for social life. I didn't forget."
“Well, maybe I'll forgive you this time." Her eyes were too bright from doing lines in the bathroom, which reminded him of the lost night and day he'd spent with her.
"I'll call ya," he said, pushing open the door to the sanctuary of the toilet. He took a leak, splashed a little water on his face, and lit a cigarette. What the hell was her name anyway?
Back at the piano, the time passed tolerably. Ones and fives and the occasional ten filled his tip glass. Some joker put in a Canadian dime.
"Those Were the Days, My Friend," he sang, and segued into an instrumental "While We're Young" and presently "At the Zoo," which wasn't really a Z song but he liked it.
He waved at the blonde who had waited till closing, got his jacket from the storeroom behind the kitchen, where the noise was muffled, the air damp and redolent of old beer. He sat for a moment on an unopened carton of beer nuts, the sudden quiet like a pressure against his ears.
In her apartment, he started to ask for a drink but she shushed him impatiently with a kiss. The convertible sofa in her small studio was open, as if she'd just gotten out of it, sheets and blankets askew. She was busily unbuckling his pants and he was about to reach for the packet of condoms in his wallet when she jumped the gun, so to speak, and produced one from her mouth. When did she slip it in, or did she have it there all along, like chewing gum? She tugged him to the floor, twisting around so that she faced his legs. She'd shed most of her clothes along the way, revealing Calvin Klein women's jocks. These she slid down and off, keeping him in her mouth as she went. He nearly lost his erection in his admiration of her dexterity, rather inclined to give her a round of applause. Just before she guided him into sixty-nine position, she slipped a piece of Saran Wrap over her parts, and thrust up into his face, fully sanitized. He couldn't remember ever going down on plastic before, but there was a first time for everything.
2
Margo Magill stood at the corner of Fifty-Seventh Street and Lexington Avenue, unsure what to do with the rest of her evening. A light autumn rain was falling and she didn't have an umbrella. A few feet away, an ebony-skinned man crouched on an upturned carton box and called out “brella!’brella!" over and over, proffering a handful of black collapsibles made in Taiwan. It didn't seem worth it to spend four dollars when she had several perfectly good umbrellas in her apartment closet, but of course they were of no use just then. The thought made her eyes fill with tears, as if the umbrellas were neglected pets she'd forgotten to walk.
She had wanted to go to Bloomingdale's, but when she got there, after staying late at work to tend to an emergency admission, the store was packed. She couldn’t bear the crowds. It had been a strange and confusing day; the patients she'd seen were stacked up in her mind, crowding her with their endless needs and problems.
A twenty-three-year-old black woman had been abused by her father and then by her boyfriend, with three children in foster homes, burned out of her tenement, living in a shelter and sent to Bellevue Psychiatric when she became disruptive. As a psychiatric social worker, Margo did the evaluations, made recommendations to the doctor and tried to figure out how to fit these flotsam people into a system that couldn't or wouldn’t handle them.
Margo found the woman surprisingly easy to talk to, her anger understandable: at the red tape she endured each day trying to get food, a place to sleep, clean clothing. Yet the woman was neither sick enough for admission nor stable enough to extricate herself from her downward spiral. Margo sent her upstairs to see a psychiatrist, knowing that all they would do was dole out a prescription for tranquilizers or antidepressants and send her back out to the streets.
Another case saddened her more: an alcoholic man in his fifties who once had a flourishing acting career (he pulled out a soiled old clipping to show her). For a moment she thought she might take him home, give him a real meal and a real bed, and save him. But she sent him to detox for a few days, knowing he would be drinking again as soon as he was out.
Now she was restless, awash with nameless feelings and a vague sexual longing. She rarely dated anymore. It was always such a disappointment, but she had been cajoled into accepting date the next night with the accountant who came to the hospital every month to do the books. It wasn't that she was particularly attracted to him—that kind of chemical attraction only ended badly anyway, and took too much out of you. Perhaps a nice, boring guy was what she needed. So she had agreed to go with him on his company's anniversary cruise, a festive evening's sail around Manhattan on a chartered yacht. She'd had the vague idea of finding something new and wonderful to wear, but the rain and her fatigue and the teeming Bloomingdale's had put an end to that fantasy.
This was the kind of night when her thoughts turned to Michael. Whenever she began thinking about Michael, she knew depression was not far behind. Even though it had been over for more than a decade, he lingered in a corner of her mind. Sometimes she wanted to be back with him, no matter how terrible the emotional cost, if only to feel that way again, that ecstasy of mind and body without past or future. Perhaps it was merely a time in her life she longed for.
She began walking west, catching glimpses of herself in drizzly store windows, a pretty, slim woman with soft light blonde hair darkened by the rain, in a droopy gray raincoat and well-worn running sneakers. She paused at the Chanel window, distracted by an exquisite, beaded black purse. She went in, the thick glass doors barely whispering her entrance. A lithe saleswoman, no more than twenty-five, slithered over, offering assistance in a skeptical voice. Margo, immediately self-conscious, mumbled that she was only browsing. She spotted the purse and surreptitiously turned over its tiny price tag: $850. Swallowing, avoiding the bored stare of the saleswoman, she slipped out silently and continued walking in the rain.
At thirty-seven, Margo was experiencing a profound existential bewilderment. She had drifted through her youthful years, following this dream and that, certain that everything would fall into place eventually. She'd grown up in a blue-collar section of Schenectady, New York, a town close enough to the comparatively glittering capital of Albany and the society hub of Saratoga Springs to feel the contrast. At least Margo grew up feeling it, because her mother had instilled in her at an early age the conviction that they were better than their neighbors. Her mother's family had been wealthy at one time, but lost it all in the Crash, living on memories ever after. When Margo's mother married a construction man, she had seen him as an exotic species, the physical man, the John Wayne of her high school. She believed that he would rise above his origins, take over the construction company for which he worked, and climb the American entrepreneurial ladder. But Margo's father had no such ambitions, nor the imagination to conceive of them. He wasn’t John Wayne; he was Stanley Kowalski.
Margo got out of Schenectady on a scholarship to NYU, drifting through the theater department before majoring in English literature. She supported herself as a waitress all through college and long after she graduated with a useless liberal arts degree. She shared an apartment with two other actresses on the pre-gentrified Upper West Side, and worked occasionally, mostly in off-off-Broadway and experimental theater companies where money was scarce. She rolled around on the floor wailing with a Grotowski-inspired company that put on abrasive antiestablishment plays in basements and churches. Margo found it hard to balance this life with the necessary business side of show business. She hated calling agents and casting directors, waiting hours to be seen for maybe thirty seconds. It seemed commercial and crass and demeaning. By 1980, she was not working at all at her craft. She was, as far as the world was concerned, a waitress. She was also divorced.
Michael was the one everybody knew was going to make it. Even in the small ensemble theater company where they met, Michael stood out. He was the one agents called while all the other actors were futilely calling those same agents day after day, just trying to get in for an appointment. Michael swaggered into a room, brimming with confidence, a cigarette in the corner of his mouth like a young Bogart, an endearing wisecrack on his lips. On his first day of rehearsal, cast as the ardent, doomed Roger in the company's production of Genet's The Balcony (Margo had the small role of the Penitent) Michael, wearing round dark glasses and strikingly chic, thrift-shop clothes, intrigued the women and irritated the men.
In time, the wiser women slept with him for fun and moved on, or simply steered clear, but Margo had no such wisdom. Although she saw him flash the same smile at the theater interns, the director's wife, the girl at the box office, every once in a while he looked at her with such open sweetness, shrugging as if to say "I know I’m a louse, love me anyway," that in no time at all she did. Rehearsals became the center of her world, and she was acutely aware of Michael, as if she had grown some invisible antenna that tracked him constantly, monitoring his presence. If he sat next to another actress, she mourned; if she heard him laughing in conversation, she could barely concentrate on what she was doing.