Authors: Jay McInerney
That’s my name. My parents gave it to me, the creeps. Alison Poole. I’m going to make goddamn sure he never forgets it.
I try. I want this to be enough, just this. Just contact, just friction. But it’s not. It doesn’t fix me the way it used to, the way you always dream it will.
Get in touch with your child, Rob says at the beginning of class.
After our warm-up this guy does a scene from
Hamlet,
where Hamlet’s trying to deal with the fact that his mother married this guy who killed his father. It sounds pretty good to me and the boy’s really rolling, really emotional, and he has this great English accent, but Rob starts shouting at him about halfway through. He shouts, breathe! breathe! Your voice is up in your throat. Breathe evenly.
Finally Rob stops the guy, his name is Jim, and Jim’s all sweaty and in tears and he starts wobbling around like he’s going to faint and Rob says, what’s with all the theatrics, all this huffing and puffing, squeaks and honks, it’s all camouflage for something, what are you trying to hide?
So Jim looks real pained, he’s trying to catch his breath and he says, I think I’m going to faint.
Rob says, you’re not going to faint, that’s more camouflage, stand up straight and breathe evenly. Okay, now, what’s really going on here?
Jim shakes his head and shrugs and Rob goes, defense mechanisms.
Finally Jim gasps, defense against what?
You tell me, Rob goes.
Jim keeps saying he doesn’t know and Rob keeps after him and finally he goes, this isn’t about Hamlet and his father, this is about you and your father. It’s all camouflage for feeling that your father wasn’t strong enough, isn’t it? Isn’t that what’s going on here?
Jim starts crying and finally he says maybe that has something to do with it. Rob thinks that the scenes we pick tell a lot about us. And I’m thinking maybe so, Jim seems to be really affected by this, or else maybe he’s just playing along because it’s a good scene, I don’t know.
Acting’s about honesty, Rob goes, after Jim has his cry. Don’t be afraid of your feelings, he says.
So this girl who’s new to the class raises her hand and she goes, I worry sometimes when I get into an emotion that I’ll get totally carried away and I won’t be able to stop.
Every natural emotion has a beginning and an end, Rob says. If we surrender to a predominant emotion in class it will run its course in a healthy way. Of course, he goes, if you’re deeply troubled then you may not be able to stop and that
is
a problem.
Maybe it’s my imagination, maybe I’m just paranoid, but it seems like he looks at me when he says this, I guess he’s thinking about my little freak-out a few weeks ago, when I made like a spastic and had to go see the nurse. So okay, I never said I was normal.
Let me give you an example, Rob says, sitting up on his desk and folding his legs underneath each other—he used to study yoga in India before he decided to be an actor. Example, he goes, I sometimes have a fantasy of mowing down people on the street with a machete. I do. That doesn’t mean I’m going to act on it. But it’s something I occasionally feel. Not that I’m ever going to do it. A healthy adult can tell the difference between fantasy and reality. As a normal human being you recognize that you don’t need to act on every impulse you feel. But as an actor you tap into the fantasy and use it. Of course, first you have to know the difference between fantasy and reality.
I raise my hand and I ask, how do you tell the difference?
He looks at me and says, Alison, have you ever considered therapy? I really think you should.
I’m serious, I go.
He goes, so am I.
So after this really wonderful day at acting class I get home to deal with the fact that my ex-boyfriend, the only love of my life, is arriving any minute to sleep with my roommate. This
seems to me like a case where fantasy is leaking into reality in a serious way.
Jeannie comes home from work all flustered and excited and I find out she’s sent a car to meet Alex. I don’t believe it, I don’t mind her sleeping with my ex-boyfriend, really I don’t, but we’ve got this incredibly serious deficit in this house, we’re like Bangladesh or something, and she’s ordering limos. I was down to my last dime until I made a little withdrawal from Dean’s wallet. Foreign aid, right?
Jeannie spends the next two hours working on her eyes. Don’t ask me why, but for some reason I think of this story I heard once about these two college roommates who hated each other—one of them was a friend of mine, actually—and one night she put some Nair hair remover in her roommate’s mascara tube, you can imagine what fun that was.
Anyway, Jeannie’s fixing her eyes, so I go down to the corner —my phone away from home. First I try Dean, no luck, then I try to track down my dad. I’ve got to get hold of some serious cash. I call his office in Washington and the secretary accepts the charges and tells me to try the farm in Virginia, he’s down taking care of some horse business. Can I give him a message if he calls? she says.
Yeah, I say, tell him to get in touch with his child.
I’m kind of amazed that Dad’s in Virginia because he hardly ever goes down there anymore, Mom lives there and they can hardly stand the sight of each other. You can’t blame them, really, either of them.
Dad moved us out to the farm from Long Island after they separated, I was ten then. Before that it was a tax writeoff. It’s complicated, they’re divorced and Mom still lives there but he owns part of it or something. It’s a big white house with pillars, on a rise, seven or eight barns and stables spread out behind. It was a good place to be kids, all the land and horses. School was fifteen miles away and we’d always miss the bus and Mom could never get it together to drive us in, she was asleep most of the morning, totally zonked in her big pink canopy bed. When we were little we’d climb in and pretend it was a ship sailing off to England, where Gran was from, the chintz curtains were our sails.
I call the main house collect and Cliff answers. I ask if Dad’s there and he says no. Cliff doesn’t know where he is or when he’ll be back. Mom and Carol are out shopping. I tell him to have my dad call me, then I hang up.
Cliff is probably my least favorite person in the whole world. He’s Dad’s right-hand man, he drives the car and beats people up or something. He tried to rape me when I was a kid. I was out in the stables and he cornered me, the only thing that saved me was I had the curry comb, I’d been brushing Eric the Red, and I finally whacked his face with it. I wish I’d hit him where it really hurt but I was so freaked out, his hands pinning me to the walls, and I ran like hell after I hit him. When I told Dad, he acted like he didn’t believe me. And finally he said Cliff didn’t mean any harm and told me to shut up about it. That’s when I realized Cliff had something on him, that Dad
couldn’t afford to fire him. That’s also when I realized that my father was a complete asshole.
I call Dean again and get his machine. Story of my life.
I don’t want to be around to spoil the tender moment, Alex meeting Jeannie for the first time, so I fish out another quarter and call up Whitney to have a drink with her. Then I go back to the apartment and tell Jeannie I’ll meet them later for dinner, but Whitney and I get really blasted and I keep trying Dean and getting his machine and so finally I go, okay, two can play that game.
The next morning I call up the apartment, I’m hungover as hell, and I check to make sure they’re awake, I don’t really feel like walking in on them when they’re rolling around in bed, and Jeannie answers the phone all giggly like a newly minted ex-virgin or something and she says, Alison, come on up for breakfast, which is a zany idea, I don’t think anybody’s ever eaten breakfast in our apartment before. But then I remember, Alex loves the big breakfast production number, eggs and bacon and toast, the works, he’d cook up a storm most mornings, scramble five or six eggs just for himself, I’d be sitting there moaning over coffee and I’d say you’re such a pig, Alex, and he’d say, I need my eggs if I’m gonna keep my baby satisfied.
I wonder if he said that to Jeannie.
I’ve got to say this is bugging me a little. Okay, I admit it. The funny thing is, I couldn’t even stand the idea of sex, of having men touch me, until Alex.
He greets me at the door and gives me a big hug and even after everything it’s good to feel his body and I know that I can forgive him, whatever happened it’s no big deal, he’s still there for me somehow, a way that Jeannie can’t touch. He looks great, tan and dark and beefy. Jeannie kind of peeks out from the bedroom.
So, I go, when Alex finally lets go of me.
So what? says Alex.
You know, I say.
Jeannie says, I’m not the kind of girl who kisses and tells.
Right, I say, can I remind you who you’re talking to here, I’m like your best friend and roommate, the one you always tell about your so-called kissing.
Let’s eat breakfast, Jeannie says.
We decide to go out for a walk, Alex has never really seen New York, so we take him to Bergdorf’s and make him buy us both some perfume. Then we go to Trader Vic’s and have a couple of scorpions, we tell Alex about our wild weekend at the Plaza and then me and Alex tell Jeannie about the time we went to
the Fontainebleau in Miami and flooded our room. Thinking about the weekend in Miami gives me a great idea, flooding the room wasn’t half of what we did. Let’s go to Forty-second Street, I say, and Alex is totally up for it, Jeannie’s not so sure but she’s really careful about showing it because she doesn’t want it to suddenly become me and Alex again, she wants to stake her own claim.
So we walk down to Times Square. We’re walking down Fifth and after a while Alex goes, what are all these people doing collapsed in heaps on the street? I guess we’ve been passing a lot of bag ladies and bums, and I’m like, I don’t know, they’re everywhere, and Jeannie goes, we’ve got a guy who sort of lives under the awning of our apartment building, which is true. When Alex sees the big black guy with the ski parka and the seeing-eye dog selling pencils out in front of Saks he stops and starts in on this big conversation, asking the guy where he’s from and stuff. Jeannie’s sort of embarrassed but I think it’s cool, this is what I love about Alex, he’s such a nut. Finally he buys a pencil and gives the man two bucks.
Alex is the total tourist, he sees the Empire State Building way down Fifth and he’s like, wow, let’s go up, and he’s amazed when Jeannie and I say we’ve never been up it. So we promise we’ll take him but first we go into this sex shop on Forty-second over by Port Authority after dodging all the drug dealers and pimps and Japanese tourists. There’s five or six guys drooling over the magazine racks and they all sort of freak out when Jeannie and I walk in. Jeannie freaks
out a little herself, she can’t help looking like a nice girl from Princeton, New Jersey. Alex and I go over and start checking out the magazines, showing each other pictures and reading the titles. I pick up
Young Girls
and say, I’m going to buy this for my father.
And Alex says, yeah, really.
I can tell he’s getting into being with me, we go back too far and too deep for Jeannie to understand and she’s beginning to get a little upset about it.
I drag Alex over to the counter and make him check out the sex toys with me. The counterman is looking at us like he’s afraid we’re from Neptune or something. We start asking him to show us the stuff and how they work and what the features are. Meanwhile the perverts are slinking out of the store, they can’t take it.
Finally we decide to get the four-pack vibrator sets, one for Jeannie and one for me, it comes with a battery pack and four attachments, the Super Stud, the French Tickler, the Rear-Ender and the Old Faithful. Alex pays. Anything to make my girls happy, he says.
We take Alex to Sardi’s for a drink, we’re trying to make sure we don’t miss any of the touristy things to do. Alex wants to see some stars but the bartender tells us it’s too early. The stars come out at night, he says and laughs like this is a great piece of wit. He’s not bad-looking, though, maybe thirty, looks a little bit like Christopher Reeve. I don’t even have to ask if he’s an actor, you can tell from the way he talks he’s been
taking voice. He’s overdoing the whole chest thing. We show the bartender our new toys and he gives us a free drink. When we’re leaving he asks for my phone number, so I give him the Midnite Escort Service number, I memorized it for these kind of occasions.
Then we take a cab over to the Empire State Building and pay our two bucks and wait around in the lobby for the elevator with all these like families, moms and kids. Once we get on the elevator it smells like milk, I kid you not, and some little red-headed boy grabs my knee and gets gum all over my jeans. Freckle-faced, he looks like something out of a peanut butter ad. Another little kid starts bawling. I don’t know, they talk about this maternal instinct, I can’t say it’s ever really hit me, but then I don’t think it ever hit my mother either. I think she was just too lazy to put in her diaphragm some nights.
The ride up makes me really nauseous, my stomach gets left behind on the lower floors. We have to change elevators to get to the very top. Alex has his arm around Jeannie. She’s telling him about her job and he’s looking fascinated. It’s really amazing the things we pretend to be interested in when we want to sleep with somebody. Sometimes I think conversation between girls and guys is all just foreplay.
To take my mind off how nauseous I’m feeling I say, hey Alex, what are the three great lies?
It’s weird, he comes up with the same two I already know, except his second lie is a little different than my version, it goes, I promise I’ll pull out before I come, you can bet the moms
in the elevator are really freaked out by this conversation. But he can’t think of the third one either.
Finally we get up to the observation deck and pile out of the kiddie capsule. I’m really dizzy. Jeannie and Alex rush over to the fence to look out, there’s like this chicken wire all around the platform and blue sky beyond. The chicken wire’s so nobody will jump, I guess, and it reminds me of this thing I saw in a book of photos from
Life
magazine, this picture of a car parked on the street, the roof of the car molded around the body of a girl who’d jumped from the Empire State Building. She was wearing a long billowing skirt that fanned out like a huge lily across the top of the car, the kind of dress you’d wear to a ball or a fancy dinner, she was lying face down so you didn’t necessarily figure out what was wrong at first, it was as if she was resting or floating in a pool, a girl without a trouble in the world. . . .