Hysterical Girl wasn’t a particularly strong play, but the character of Dora was compelling, this frightened and repressed teenaged girl who was so riddled with coughs and gags and twitches and seizures that her father, in exasperation, finally took her to see Freud. What her father couldn’t have predicted was that, over the course of her brief and truncated analysis, Dora would tell the doctor all about her father’s affair with a young, pretty woman referred to in the case study as Frau K., a nurse who tended to Dora’s syphilitic father, and whom Dora herself worshiped. When Dora revealed that her beloved Frau K.’s husband Herr K. had tried to kiss and fondle Dora almost as though she were a consolation prize, Freud offered an association between the complex sexual triangle and Dora’s symptoms. Dora was so disturbed by Freud’s unsparing interpretations that she abruptly broke off treatment, never to return. Forty years passed, and the unhappy girl became an unhappy old woman, and when the Second World War began, Freud’s former patient became, like him, just one more persecuted Jew, her misery drowned out among the miseries of others.
The idea, Thea Herlihy felt as she listened to Nelson talk about his beloved Dora, was that the story contained the elements of a tragedy. It was all about one woman’s unfulfilled life, and the actors nodded and spoke about Dora in ways that made them feel superior to her, as though she were nothing like them; as though all of them had masterly control over their own wishes and gravest fears.
“What’s interesting to me,” Nelson told the assembled cast, “is that Dora’s symptoms were basically a nineteenth-century phenomenon. We don’t see neurasthenia anymore. It was very much of its time. They say that every era gets the symptoms it deserves. Like today, the beginning of the twenty-first century—what do people have now?”
“Despair,” said one actor.
“Terror,” said another.
“Unrealistically high self-regard,” said a woman, and everyone laughed briefly.
“Chronic fatigue?” asked Anne Freling, the actress who was playing the part of Frau K.
“Yes, Anne, that’s right,” said Nelson. “Chronic fatigue. No one is sure if it’s real or not, right? Chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia—these nebulous diseases might be symptoms of a terrible over-scheduling in our lives, a drumbeat of activity and ambition. Multitasking; isn’t that what those women’s magazines say we’re doing all the time?”
Before rehearsal ended for the day, Nelson said that he wanted each of the cast members to learn everything they could about the real-life case history and the characters involved. “Dora had a very troubled family life,” he said. “It’s all there in the literature, so please do your homework. I want these people to seem both from another era and yet completely understandable to a contemporary audience. This is a play about sexuality and repression, and these are timeless themes, people. Don’t forget that.”
The cast walked out in small groups, and Thea found herself beside Anne Freling. This was slightly awkward, for everyone held back from Anne; it was a phenomenon that had occurred naturally since the rehearsals had begun. The actress was the only one among them who was famous, having appeared for ten years in a television show about a group of twentyish friends who jointly and improbably inherit a Park Avenue apartment. When Classic 6 went off the air to great fanfare three years earlier, a few members of the six-person cast tried to keep their television careers alive, but in most instances this was like starting a fire with damp twigs. They had all belonged in that absurdly enormous fantasy apartment-set each week, and nowhere else. Fairly soon they were extruded one by one from the tight and time-limited world of television fame.
But Anne Freling found a way to cope. Instead of appearing on commercials for pizza bites or calcium chews, like two of the other cast members, she went right to theatre. She was given parts in small, interesting plays, and whenever she appeared, the production was likely to be reviewed and taken seriously. Anne Freling was aloof, in her late thirties, blonde and wan, thinner than she should have been, and she was never without a bottle of Poland Spring water, all aspects that impressed the other actors as being somehow connected to success.
Walking out of the theatre, past the low-hanging lights and the scenery propped against walls, Anne gave a glance in Thea’s general direction and said, “Coffee?” which Thea initially interpreted to mean that the actress wanted Thea to run out and fetch her a cup of coffee. But no, that couldn’t be right. Quickly, Thea reinterpreted.
“Sure,” she said after a beat, trying to conceal her wonder.
The two women sat in a diner called the Chelsea Delight; Thea, on a nervous whim, ordered rice pudding as well as coffee, and Anne Freling seemed amused.
“I haven’t seen anyone order rice pudding,” Anne said. “Ever. That’s how long it’s been.”
“I had a hankering for it.”
“And I haven’t heard anyone use the word ‘hankering.’”
“I’m a woman of surprises,” said Thea, instantly jarred by the strangeness of her own remark, as though she were reading lines from a drawing-room comedy.
“I was thinking that maybe we should get together to practice,” Anne said. “The scene where Dora and Frau K. meet for the first time, at the picnic? It seems kind of wooden to me.”
Thea tried to appear only mildly interested in the suggestion, but the following week, when she appeared at Anne’s apartment door one morning to rehearse, she was reminded of the first time she and Michael went out. They had gone to a Vietnamese restaurant downtown and drunk beer and eaten garlicky noodles in deep bowls, and told each other as many details as they could about themselves. He talked about his parents, God, those wild, oversexed parents, though when you met them individually they were just these really nice, suburban, sort of old people. It was so hard to imagine that once they’d been sexual forerunners, and it was even harder to imagine that Michael was the product of that marriage. For though he was attractive and strong and good in bed in the beginning, he was almost never spontaneous or free. In exchange she’d told him her own, much more mundane stories about life in Marblehead, Massachusetts, and her father the veterinarian. Afterward, they’d gone back to his high-rise apartment on Amsterdam Avenue, and she realized that she didn’t know anyone else who lived as well as he did. All the hardscrabble actors’ apartments she’d been in, and lived in, all the shares up in the Dominican enclave in Washington Heights, or else deep in the sooty belly of Brooklyn, in Fort Greene or Red Hook. This was entirely different, this pristine bachelor pad that Michael occupied, with its large, unopenable windows looking out over the city and the river, and its onyx kitchen counters and shining bathroom.
He was good-looking and smart and troubled and lonely, and she knew, that first night, that he would want her embedded in his life, for he wouldn’t come across women like her too often in the world of Dimension D-Net, where he worked. And she knew that she would want to be embedded in his life, too. After the sex, which was fun and exciting that first time, if not exactly up to the standards of Pleasuring, she’d slept better than she ever had in her entire life. Maybe it was the sheets, which were something like one-million-thread-count, or maybe it was Michael Mellow himself, who was like a large, soothing prayer stone beside her in bed. This was well before the depression, the Endeva, the sex problems that followed.
Anne Freling also had a good apartment, though very different from Michael’s. It was off Gramercy Park, in an old doorman building, with flowery moldings and a fireplace made of delicately veined rose marble. Thea wasn’t proud of this fact that she was rapidly learning about herself—that money and its trappings attracted her—but as she walked through Anne’s foyer and down a step into the sunken living room (just the word “sunken” sounded rich) she felt as though she were sleepwalking toward something inevitable. Anne had made her money on Classic 6, and there was a scatter of photographs in her living room of the former cast members, all of them trapped in a hopeful time, before they would disappear from view and become ordinary civilians again.
The two women sat on the low white couch and rehearsed the picnic scene, and Anne was right; there was something about being away from the chilly, naked theatre, the other actors, and the ambling collection of crew members that gave the scene an intimacy it had previously lacked. Now each line of dialogue hovered, isolated, in the room, and anything that came out flat or false could be immediately recognized.
Dora and Frau K. had been very close friends; Freud had written about bisexuality after treating his troubled young patient. All of the women in that time and place, Thea had learned, were stuffed into muslin and starched cotton and forced to sit ramrod-straight and plait their hair or pull it back off their faces with fish oil. There were shoes that laced up with a hundred eyelets, and corsets that required a special hook to open. Women were all in it together back then, as opposed to now, when one woman’s experience could differ so greatly from another’s that you never knew who you were talking to.
Thea Herlihy had nothing in common with Anne Freling. The former television actress seemed confident and slightly irritated. She regularly visited a chiropractor for unresolved neck issues, was divorced and wealthy, and had time on her hands. Thea was younger, more cheerful, had never been successful, had never made any money, and, until Michael had gone away to Naples, Florida, last month, hadn’t been alone in two years.
But Michael was away now, and Thea could almost pretend to herself that her life was not all that different from Anne’s. Without Michael around she was available for private rehearsals during the day and perhaps in the evening, and she was not required to explain herself and her movements. While at first Thea had been annoyed by his protracted visit to his father, she started to realize that her annoyance was manufactured, a product of some atavistic place in which women were eternally angry at men for their thoughtless behavior. Vaguely she had an image of her own mother standing in the doorway of the house in Marblehead, waiting with quiet righteousness as her father came into the house a solid hour late for dinner. Though his veterinarian’s excuses were always good—a horse was foaling, a schnauzer had been hit by a car—her mother was practically on fire with being wounded, with being right, holding out a Pyrex casserole of green beans as if to say, See? See? as though he might be able to tell, simply by looking at the casserole, that it was ice cold.
It wasn’t that Michael made many demands on Thea, but she kept being aware that she was relieved with him gone. Sex had become difficult, yes, if only because there was now an actual sexual problem between them, something that needed to be solved, and every time they slept together the problem came along, lumbering and enormous. She was twenty-eight years old; this was too young to deal with someone’s sexual problems. She tried to bring him to orgasm again and again, all the while feeling a kind of anxiety and desire for things to hurry along to their conclusion. Aware of how difficult it was for him to have an orgasm, she seemed to be forcing it, yanking on his penis as though it were an object stuck in a drain.
His unhappiness made her despondent, too, for she didn’t want him to be miserable like this, but still she had to admit that if it was completely up to her, they wouldn’t have sex again until this issue was out of the picture. Why have sex if there was a problem with it? Wasn’t the whole point of sex its freedom and abandon and ease? That two bodies could come together as bodies and not worry about all the neurotic hollows of the psyche? Apparently, no. Apparently problems crept into sex, too, and if you loved the other person, as Thea loved Michael, then you had to work them through, whatever that meant. You had to keep yanking on a penis until it unstuck itself, until the man it was attached to was able to lose himself in pleasure, and both of you could sigh with relief and settle down to sleep.
Michael was a better person than she was, for if the roles had been reversed, he would never feel impatient with her. She had a fantasy that when he returned from Florida his skin would have a golden tan, he would smell of coconut oil, and they would fall upon each other in a pileup of lust, and he would ejaculate in about two seconds, and they could share a pint of mocha chip and joke around long into the night before sleep. His sexual problems would have been mysteriously worked out somehow while he was gone, as though spending time with one’s father could cure difficulties in the bedroom, not to mention larger difficulties.
Such as, that she no longer loved him as much as she once had.
She had written him a letter, trying to broach these matters in a way that wasn’t inflammatory. She referred to “the problem,” as well as her own “distancing mechanism.” The letter seemed like a manual for an appliance of some sort: technical, devoid of lyricism. It said nothing much, but it sent him an obscure warning: If you think things between us are fine, then you are mistaken.
He called from Florida in response to the letter but did not seem very upset by it. “I know what you mean,” he said. “We’ll figure it out.” As though the appliance were broken, or needed another part, but it wasn’t the most urgent of tasks.
Something had changed, they both saw, had frayed over time, had been there even before he went away. Maybe it was the fact that he had gotten depressed and needed to take Endeva. Or maybe he had gotten depressed and needed to take Endeva because there had been a subtle shift in her love for him. Maybe he had sensed it, but had never been brave enough to mention it to her.
“Let’s run through the scene again,” Anne Freling was saying, and Thea was grateful to think only about late-nineteenth-century Austria and Freudian principles and, most of all, of having the total, rapt attention of Anne Freling. “Dora was obsessed with Frau K.,” Anne said. “She worshiped her, and so did her father. And Frau K. obviously got off on being so loved by the two of them. Who wouldn’t? God, it’s like being on TV. People love you and they don’t even know you. They build up this idea of you, you know? And then it becomes fixed in their heads, and nothing can change it.” Anne had a tight smile as she spoke, as if to demonstrate her own courage at having once been important, at least in the world of television, and then losing that importance.
When the rehearsal was done, Anne offered Thea lunch, bringing a collection of take-out menus from a drawer. They both chose salades nicoises, which Anne paid for, handing money to the delivery boy, who immediately ducked back out into the hallway, looking terrified. Anne inspired terror in anyone she was with; Thea felt a little bit of the spillover, and it wasn’t unpleasant.
They sat at a big oak table in the living room eating lunch from round tinfoil containers, spitting out their pointy olive pits. Anne served bottles of water, which, Thea noted, she guzzled as though she’d been in the desert for months. Back on the couch after lunch as the rehearsal continued, Thea felt emboldened by the food, even a little bit high. She found herself joking with Anne, making wisecracks about “poor, clueless Dora,” and about “that sexpot, Frau K.”
“Now, now,” said Anne. “Dora was manipulative, you know. That was the whole point of such an illness. It gave the sufferer something that she wanted, and that she didn’t know how to get any other way.”
“I wouldn’t know how to be manipulative,” Thea said, deadpan, and Anne laughed with a little bark.
“Oh, right!” she said. “That’s not what I’ve heard.”
“What? Where have you ever heard something about me?” Thea asked.
“I read about you in a magazine. Failed Experimental Theatre Monthly. You were on the cover.”
Now Thea whooped a little, excited by the idea that this actress had hidden reserves of wit. “Yes, I remember that cover,” Thea said, feeling herself getting worked up further. “It was a picture of me in The Bald Soprano.”
“You really look a lot better with hair,” said Anne Freling. And then, before there was an unrecoverable pause and a shift to some new, different moment, Anne reached out a hand and placed it on Thea’s hair. She let her fingers play with the hair, as though testing it for texture and thickness.
When Anne came forward and kissed Thea, she thought of the
scene from another angle, as though it were in fact a scene, something watched by others, something that would be commented on afterward during the critique.
“I think the women were both very hot,” someone would say.
“I wanted to see them do it,” an actor would add. “I mean, really do it. Clothes off on that couch.”
Yes, the clothes would come off, in two similar little piles, but there would be no audience for this. Anne crawled across her the way a cat might, with the lightest paws, and Thea found herself pinned down, looking up. Anne’s hair swung in her face, and Thea could detect the various components of female clean: the soap, the lotion, the scent on wrists and neck, released full-force in moments of stress or heat.
It’s too bad the imaginary audience isn’t here, Thea thought, because this is so amazingly aesthetic. That was the thing about two good-looking women having sex. At first you could almost die from the delicacy, from the long wrists, yoga-bred bodies, and subtle flashes of thin gold chain or ear-stud or pearl-gloss pedicure. Sex between two women now seemed to her like an exclusive club, and in order to join it you would need to look like this, and admire yourself and the other person, and feel a great relief that no one else was allowed in.