When I get like this, Renee turns hideously chirpy, trying to snap me out of it. It never works, but I usually end up faking at least a partial recovery, just to get her off my case. Last night, in an effort to cheer, she made my favorite meal (pot roast) and regaled me with half a dozen Jeffrey Dahmer jokes she’d heard at work. I groaned and laughed as much as I could, pretended to be my old self again, and went to bed early, crying myself to sleep. I had another long, vivid dream about Mom.
In this one we were attending a sort of premiere party for my new video. Renee was there too, and Neil and Jeff and Tread and Philip Blenheim and even Aunt Edie, fresh off the bus from Baker. Mom had her hair in the sort of beehive she stopped wearing about the time I was born. She looked really modern like that—so out she was in—and I told her so, which thrilled her no end. The video was on an endless loop projected onto a huge cube above the buffet table. Philip Blenheim was impressed by my voice and how thin I looked. When I introduced him to Aunt Edie, she got way too gushy about Mr. Woods, but Philip took it all in stride and winked at me secretly, one professional to another. He offered me a role in his next film, but I played hard to get and said something vague about an obligation to Marty Scorsese.
Then the scene shifted abruptly, and Mom and I were on a bluff above the Pacific. It was sunset, and Mom’s skin was all golden and smooth, like a nymph in a Maxfield Parrish painting. She sat next to me, brushing my hair and singing softly. When I told her I thought she was dead, she laughed and said she’d just been in Palm Springs, developing a miniseries about Lya Graf—a real person I’ll tell you about later. Mom said an executive at Fox, somebody just under Barry Diller and extremely excited about the project, thought I’d be perfect for the role. I squealed and hugged her and felt a warming rush of relief. I thought she’d left me for good, and here she was, lovelier than ever and so real I could smell her Jean Naté, making big plans for our future as if she’d never been away.
On with the shitty news: Janet Glidden called this morning to say she’d been having “problems in the lab” and that we might have to reshoot the video. I hit the ceiling and called her a “total incompetent” who didn’t deserve to be working with “real professionals.” Even as I said it, this sounded pompous, so I called her back a few minutes later and apologized. She was so shaken that my raging disappointment was instantly replaced by raging guilt. The project is a goner, obviously; I might as well face that now and be done with it. To spend another day lip-syncing in that stuffy greenhouse would only prolong the agony. I bowed out as nicely as I could, but Janet didn’t take it very well. Too bad. The way I see it, if she has to start over again, she might as well start with somebody else.
I called Neil to fill him in, figuring Janet would probably call to cry on his shoulder. He was more than sympathetic and even tried to take responsibility for the whole mess. I can’t believe how nice he is.
We’ve had no gigs for a week and won’t for another two or three. Neil says not to worry about it, that things usually slow down in the fall. He seemed to be enjoying the break, actually. His kid was there for the weekend, and I could hear him romping and giggling in the background.
Aunt Edie called a little while ago, but I didn’t pick up. How the woman does it I’ll never know. The moment my life begins to fall apart, she homes in on me like a buzzard circling dead meat. She left a message on the machine about running into Lanny March at a gas station in Baker. Lanny March was a boy I hung out with in high school and haven’t seen since. We played Clue together after school and went to the occasional movie, so Aunt Edie regards him as a vaguely romantic figure in my life, which he wasn’t at all. He was probably a big homo, come to think of it, given his sweetly bemused demeanor and his enduring passion for Bernadette Peters. Aunt Edie only mentioned him to remind me that everyone who really cares about me still lives in Baker.
Aunt Edie is Mom’s slightly younger sister, though you’d never believe those two came from the same womb. Aunt Edie is so uptight she makes Marilyn Quayle look like the Whore of Babylon. Mom could be prissy, sure, but she had a streak of real wildness too, a latent individualism that redeemed her at the most unexpected moments. She grew up in the desert, after all, in the only Jewish family for miles around. Circumstances alone must have forced her to make up some of the rules as she went along.
Given the same baggage, Aunt Edie went totally bourgeois, joining forces with Betty Crocker and Barry Goldwater to build a life her neighbors could understand. She married a restaurant manager and had three large-economy-sized children, who grew up torturing cats and puking at the Burger King and regarding Baker as the center of the civilized world. When I came into the picture—and my father, in turn, went out—Aunt Edie made such a prolonged display of sympathy that Mom broke with her completely, resolving to cope with the future on her own. She rented a new duplex on the other side of town, dyed her hair honey blond, and worked overtime at the power company to buy me my own set of encyclopedias. (I was reading voraciously by the time I was four.) To hear Mom tell it, Aunt Edie actually envied her sister’s newfound freedom, but she never copped to it, ever. Not even when Mom and I moved to Hollywood and began sending home pictures of the celebrities we’d met.
Mom used to insist that Aunt Edie wasn’t a wicked person, just a frightened one. So frightened, apparently, that whenever she visited her gynecologist, she took a special bag with her to wear on her head during cervical examinations. The theory, according to Mom, was that Aunt Edie’s dignity wouldn’t be compromised if she didn’t actually see the doctor while he was looking up her pussy. Mom swore to the absolute truth of this and permitted herself a brief disloyal giggle before swearing me to secrecy. “I mean it now, Cady. Edie would be mortified if she knew that you knew.”
Ever since then I haven’t been able to look at Aunt Edie without thinking of that damn bag. I don’t know whether it was paper or what, so I make up my own versions. Sometimes I see it as a pointy quilted thing with nose holes—a head cozy, if you will—or made of creamy linen and elaborately monogrammed, like her favorite handbag. Even at Mom’s funeral, when Aunt Edie came decked out in the world’s soberest navy-blue suit, I flashed on her in the stirrups again, her head shrouded in a matching navy bag, those skinny Nancy Reagan legs propped open like pruning shears. The image simply refuses to die. It was Mom’s final revenge on her sibling.
Actually, I’m the final revenge. When Mom phoned Aunt Edie to report that I’d landed the lead—sort of—in Philip Blenheim’s new fantasy film, it was the sweetest of victories, the ultimate payback for twenty years of simpering, uninvited pity. Mom never actually voiced her resentment, but her real message to her sister was there in the subtext of my success: See what you can do when you refuse to be frightened.
I hope I’m not making Mom sound like some sort of pushy stage mother, because she wasn’t. The dreams of stardom were all mine; Mom simply adapted to them. She was baffled and often repelled by much of what I love about show business, but she knew what I wanted more than anyone on earth, and she did more than anyone to see that I got it.
I read a book once that said that the bond between a little person and her (or his) mother is one of the most inviolable in nature. Since the child remains child-sized for life, the weaning process is sometimes postponed and dependencies can develop that persist until death. When Mom was still alive, I worried about this a lot, terrified of becoming her permanent baby.
Now that she’s gone, I just miss her.
Before I forget: Lya Graf.
Mom learned about her years ago, when she first started reading up on little people. Lya Graf was a Ringling Brothers performer in the late twenties and early thirties—a figure of great charm, from all reports, and only twenty-one inches tall. (“Almost a foot shorter than you,” Mom would remind me tartly, just to keep me from getting too swell-headed.) One day on a promotional tour, Lya visited the floor of the Senate in Washington. As luck would have it, J. P. Morgan was there at the same time, about to te
stify before the Senate Banking Committee. A canny photographer, recognizing a great photo op, deposited the dainty Lya on the not-so-dainty lap of the famous financier, and the resulting shot made front pages around the world.
Because of that, Lya became a bigger star than ever. She continued to tour with the circus, finally earning enough money to fulfill her dream of returning home with her parents to their native Germany. Alas, Hitler was in power by then, and the unique imperfection that had won Lya the hearts of children everywhere didn’t play as well in the Third Reich. Both she and her parents were consigned to the death camp at Auschwitz—and eventually to the gas chambers—in the interest of a more perfect race.
Mom fixated on this story as if it were personal lore, rattling it off with gusto to anyone who’d listen. For years I wondered if it contained an object lesson for me, a subliminal warning that might somehow spare me from Lya’s fate. What was the moral, anyway? Don’t sit on a rich man’s lap? Never try to live with your parents? I was almost a teenager before I realized that the story was merely Mom’s way of linking littleness and Jewishness, of relating her own early experience of outsiderdom to the one I had suffered. Lya Graf was us, rolled into a neat little fable about the supreme unfairness of the world.
12
THIS STRANGELY OFF-KILTER DAY STARTED WITH A WEIRD PHONE call from Neil. My first thought was that he’d finally drummed up a gig for us, but that bubble burst as soon as I noticed the peculiar note in his voice. He seemed cowed somehow, unnaturally subdued. After the briefest of preliminaries, he asked if he could come over. When I told him of course he could, he said he just wanted to make sure I was there.
“As opposed to what?” I said. “Skiing in Gstaad?”
He gave me the lamest little laugh, clearly in great discomfort.
“What’s up?”
“I think it should wait,” he said, “until I’m there.”
As soon as I hung up I began manufacturing calamities. Leading the list was the notion that I was no longer of use to PortaParty, that an old and valued customer, repelled by my presence, or maybe just my singing, had specifically requested that I not be in attendance at her little Ahmet’s, her little Blake’s, her little Zoe’s birthday party. Neil’s uncomfortable task, as I imagined it, was to break this news to me as gently as possible, hence the need to talk to me in person.
If the ax was to fall, I decided, I would handle it like Mary, Queen of Scots—looking my best. I shucked off my stretched-out mauve-period T-shirt and climbed into a deep-green sailor suit that brings out my eyes. My hair was beyond redemption, but I slapped on a quick coat of powder and lipstick, then arranged myself artfully on the living room sofa, a back issue of Premiere next to me, opened to an article about Jodie Foster. When Neil arrived, he knocked quietly once or twice, then poked his head through the doorway.
“Cady?”
“I’m here. C’mon in.”
He slouched into the house wearing khaki trousers and a Hawaiian shirt, looking just as hangdog as he had sounded on the phone. Everything about him said supplicant. If he’d been wearing a hat, he’d have held it in both hands.
I gestured to the armchair. “Take a load off.”
He lowered his rangy frame onto the worn velveteen. His eyes made a brief, anxious flight around the room before settling on me again. “Nice dress,” he said.
“This ol’ thing?”
He smiled feebly and asked if Renee was here.
“At work,” I told him.
“Oh.”
“Some people keep regular hours, you know.” This remark was meant to be chummy, a breezy acknowledgment of our common gypsy bonds, but it was much too close to the subject of employment. I regretted it instantly.
Neil nodded distractedly and let it go. “Sorry I was so vague on the phone.”
“Hey.” I shrugged, unable to manage another word. Looking back on it, I think my breathing had stopped completely.
“It’s about Janet Glidden,” Neil said at last, fixing his eyes on the rug.
“What about her?”
He swallowed hard. “She’s dead. She shot herself last week.”
I can’t tell you what a surge of relief I felt. Well, I am telling you, but I certainly couldn’t tell Neil, or let it show on my face, since he was looking as if he’d just brought word of something truly heartbreaking. What I ended up saying was “Oh, no,” or words to that effect, while I brought my hand to my cheek and left it there for a beat or two.
Neil nodded. “Linda called this morning.”
“I’m sorry…?”
“My ex-wife. Janet’s old friend.”
“Oh, yeah.”
“She didn’t know the details.” He scuffed the arm of the chair with the flat of his hand, filling dead air. “I wanted to tell you in person, to make sure you didn’t feel…you know, responsible.”
I nodded slowly, letting that sink in.
“Linda said she’d been depressed for weeks. Janet, I mean. So anything you might’ve said to her on the phone wouldn’t really have made that much…Well, you could tell how fucked up she was that day at the greenhouse.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I guess so.” I suppose I was rattled by then, but more than anything, I was touched by Neil’s instinct to protect me, to spare me the guilt. Was guilt warranted? I wondered. Had my little diatribe about Janet’s “incompetence” come at entirely the wrong time? What if she had told someone about the tantrum? Or left a note. Christ, a note. Goodbye, cruel world. The dwarf made me do it. “Does Linda know that Janet and I…had words?”
Neil shook his head. “She didn’t mention it, anyway.”
“Did she call you?”
“Linda?”
“No, Janet. After I cussed her out. I thought she might.”
Neil said she hadn’t called.
“I called her back, you know. I tried to be really nice about it.”
“I know. I remember. I really don’t think it had anything to do with…”
“What was she depressed about? Did Linda say?”
“No. Just…general stuff.”
“General stuff.” I echoed him flatly, beginning to be annoyed by his vagueness.
“Janet had a few wheels in the sand, Cady. She always did.”
I asked him if he’d known this when he’d fixed me up with her.
“Well…” He picked his words carefully. “I knew she was neurotic. Lots of creative people are. It comes with the territory.”
“Yeah,” I said numbly. “I suppose.”
“I’m really sorry, Cady. If it hadn’t been for me…”
“Oh, c’mon now.” I wanted to be magnanimous, to brush it off as nothing, but my mind kept lurching back to the scene of the carnage, sifting through the wreckage for clues, the black box of Janet’s personality. “She didn’t leave a note?”
“Apparently not.”
“What day did she do it?”
Neil chewed on that for a moment. “Tuesday, I think.”
The day after, I thought. “Where?”
“At home. Her place in Brentwood.”
I had already pictured her at the greenhouse, the setting of her final failure, that pale, angular body sprawled across the stage like a broken marionette, the lighting next to perfect. What if she hadn’t been in dwarf panic that day? What if she had just been in panic, pursued by some entirely personal demon?…And what if she had managed to keep that monster at bay until yours truly stepped in to destroy her defenses with a few lethal words?
You’re a total incompetent, Janet. You don’t deserve to work with real professionals.
Neil must have noticed the stricken look on my face, because he left the chair and sat on the floor next to the sofa, taking my hand in his. “Look, Cady. There are lots of people thinking the same thing right now. There’s no way you can take the blame for this. You hardly even knew her.”
“I suppose.”
A moment of weighty silence passed, broken only by the piglet squeals o
f the Stoate kids, running amuck in their backyard. Neil gazed up at me with a sleepy, ironic smile. “There’s more.”
“Oh, shit. What?”
“It’s not bad. It’s sort of nice, actually. They’ve invited us to the funeral.”
I couldn’t have been more stunned. “Who?”
“Janet’s parents.”
“They didn’t.”
He nodded. “They specifically requested you.”
“They don’t even know me.”
“They knew about the video, I guess.”
“Did they know I walked out on the video?”
“Doesn’t sound like it. Linda just said they were trying to reach some of Janet’s film friends. They want the funeral to, you know, reflect her life.”
Yeah, I thought, but what if Janet had told her mother about the Incident? And what if her mother had invited me to the service just to lure me into an ugly confrontation? I could already see her weeping hysterically, flinging her pale, gawky, Janet-like body across her daughter’s coffin as she thrust an accusing finger (long and white, like Janet’s) at the wicked actress in the front row.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“I think it would mean something if you were there,” Neil countered. “They think of you as Somebody.”
“Who does?”
“Janet’s parents.”
“C’mon.”
Neil shrugged. “They know about Mr. Woods, at least. Linda said they did.”