I’d acquired the infamous Martyrman at the Sundance Playlab. I’d gone to all his rehearsals, because I’d had a crush on the playwright whose play he was in. My perfect attendance had caused Martyrman to believe that I’d had a crush on him. The writer had been impervious to my charms, but Martyrman had flattered me into his single bed, thus beginning two years of disaster. Actors were notoriously hard to break up with. They tended to filibuster with dramatic monologues.
At the same conference, a crotchety composer had sung me a short experimental song, comparing my breasts to “two shining harvest moons,” and then tried for a lunar landing. A famous producer had given me a ride up the mountain during a rainstorm and told me that if I ever wanted to get a play produced, I’d need to start screwing producers. A female Wiccan had invited me to a naked celebration on the mountaintop, and then put a curse on me for failing to show up. All in all, writers’ conferences were dangerous places to be friendly to anyone.
Hence, my force field. If someone asked me out, I’d go, but I’d do whatever I could not to attract anyone. I’d radiate professionalism, and work rabidly on my children’s play. That was the other thing. It was a children’s play conference. How bad could it be?
I WAS TAKING MY PLAY, The Incredible Disappearing Lady, which every artistic director in the country would shortly reject as “too dark.” So what if it had a mother running away from her children to join the circus? It was a musical, damn it! There was a torch song-singing lion, and he sang a catchy ditty about being lonely as a piece of liver. My favorite song had the mother taking “a single banana inside of her bandanna…she’s gone to Havana, or maybe to Berlin. She shouldn’t go anywhere, showing so much skin…”
I got grief about the symbolism of the banana.
“No child thinks that way,” I said. “Only adults do.” To no avail.
I was quickly informed that, in children’s theater, mothers were not allowed to leave. Only fathers were. And if the mothers left, they were very emphatically not allowed to take anything resembling a banana with them as provisions. As usual, I was mystified by the muck of sexual politics, what women were and were not allowed to do.
Mostly, though, I was happy to be at the conference, because my idolized playwright had indeed shown up, and the conference was small enough that I knew I’d be able to meet him. I’d read his play—rather, his cycle of ten short plays—years before, on a family vacation, while sitting on the beach at the Oregon Coast. I’d gotten lost for hours in the two-hundred-year epic of love, land, and family, becoming so enamored that I’d promptly gone home and tried to write my own version. Obviously, I’d foundered, ‘round about play two. The Kentucky Cycle was, in my opinion, a masterpiece of American mythology. The Playwright had won a Pulitzer for it.
I’d never met a Pulitzer winner before, and contrary to my fantasies, the Playwright was not nine feet tall and decked in intimidating robes and a crown. He was a handsome, shockingly approachable-looking guy in his midforties, with silvering blond hair and beard, bright blue eyes, a plaid shirt, and a worn-in leather bag, full of what? Pages upon pages of genius, I was certain.
It turned out that we were sharing a cast. Both of our plays needed four actors, and they needed the same four actors. In fact, we’d written basically the same play. He’d been smarter than I, however, given that his had a missing father, not mother. And no bananas. The actors told me he was a nice guy and that I should just say hello, but I was too starstruck. I skittered around the edges of rooms, eyeballing him from various corners for a couple of days, attempting to learn how to pronounce his last name. He didn’t seem to be arrogant. His brain was not swollen out and hidden beneath a hat. That put him in the minority. Children’s play authors were, on the whole, an odd-looking bunch, the sort of people whose childhood misfit status echoed into the present. I was right at home, in other words. To my good fortune, a group gathered for dinner at a Japanese restaurant, and I finally got up the nerve to seat myself across from him. I immediately started name-dropping. We had mutual acquaintances. I’d researched.
I WAS SHOCKED TO DISCOVER that when the Playwright listened, he listened with absolute focus. None of the men I’d met lately had had this quality. Revise. None of the men I’d ever met had had this quality, at least not so intensely. He made me so nervous that I managed to use my chopsticks backward, but he also had a big, raucous laugh, a brilliant smile, and something else. I couldn’t put my finger on it. He was perfectly sociable, but there was a certain restraint beneath the surface. I spent the evening trying to figure out what he wasn’t saying. When he thought no one was watching him, something arrived in his eyes. It seemed to be sadness, though I felt that this was implausible. What did he have to be sad about? I could only imagine having a life as fantastic as the Playwright’s was. He wrote for a living, screenplays as well as plays. And he wasn’t just hoping to be discovered in the slush pile—the Schwab’s drugstore of screenwriters—as everyone I knew at NYU was. He wrote for Hollywood, which, to my mind, gave him a golden glow. He owned a house, with a view of a lake. He had his very own Pulitzer, for God’s sake, and short of a Nobel, that was as good as it got. The man had the perfect life.
I decided that I was wrong about the sadness. Maybe he was just tired. He caught me staring, and gave me the smile again.
“Sorry, what? I was drifting,” he said.
“Thinking about your play?”
“Yeah,” he said, after a moment. “You, too?”
“Yeah,” I lied. “It’s all I ever think about.”
He handed me my fortune cookie. “The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” Typical. The universe was sending me an inappropriate message. What step? The Playwright was wearing a wedding ring. That step was not going to happen.
We drank our tea. We talked until everyone else was ready to leave, and then we talked some more as we walked home. I was still starstruck, and I was happy to discover that I had reason to be. The Playwright was not only a wonderful writer, he seemed to be a wonderful person.
It figured that the only wonderful person I’d met in months was someone I had no prayer of ever dating. He’d never ask, and even if he did, I’d never be able to say yes. Married. Kids. I wasn’t in the market for that particular disaster, and my yes policy, without question, didn’t include cheaters. Oh well. I didn’t need to worry about it anyway, because he showed no sign of being interested in me. Which, I reminded myself, was a really good thing.
“SO, WHAT’RE YOU LOOKING FOR, Maria Headley?” The Playwright and I were leaning up against a ballroom wall, sick of working the room during the conference’s final cocktail party. I’d seen him edging toward the door. Since I’d been doing the same thing, I’d joined him. “What’s your life missing?”
“A better class of man,” I said, without thinking, and then regretted it. I sounded stupid. Of course my life needed things other than a man—what was I, the heroine of a 1930s pulp romance?—but somehow, alas, that was what had come out. Had I a brain at all, I might have said something along the lines of “an air conditioner,” or “enough money to pay my rent this month.”
“What do you mean? I can’t imagine you have a hard time getting a date…?” He seemed genuinely amazed. I was flattered, but certainly, it was possible for me to imagine myself forever dateless, and forever loveless seemed even more plausible. Look at what had happened with the Boxer. Look at the Princelings. The Handyman. Martyrman. Zak, the only one I really cared about. Look at everything. I could see plenty of my flaws, and it was very likely that there were more flaws just waiting to be discovered. I talked too fast, and listened badly. I had a weird haircut, getting weirder every day, and a tendency to fall up subway staircases, like a fish trying and failing to evolve. All my clothes came from the Salvation Army. And according to Vic’s calculations, I was a slut.
“I mean, I can’t find one I really want. I guess. That’s all. Or one who really wants me, either, actually. I don’t mean to sound arrog
ant.”
“Hell, darlin’, it’s a tall order to find one that measures up to you,” he said, and grinned. I was stymied.
I reminded myself that he was just being nice. He had, after all, been an actor before he’d been a writer. He was acting. Acting! I must have looked pretty pitiful, if he felt the need to buffer my self-confidence in such a way. I reminded myself that this man was not just a writer, not just an actor, but a writer-actor. Both of my nemesis professions, rolled into one. I repeated “writer-actor” seventeen times in my head, talking myself out of having any form of a crush on the Playwright. I took a deep breath and searched for a new topic. A depressing, unromantic one. Eugene O’Neill, how about? The Iceman Cometh?
“I’m going to bed,” he said. “Early flight tomorrow. It was nice to meet you.” And then he shook my hand.
Thank God.
I wasn’t hitting on the Playwright, and he wasn’t hitting on me. I wasn’t the kind of person who wanted to steal someone else’s man. It was bad form, and though much of my life was an exercise in bad form, that particular thing was outside my limits.
Besides, I didn’t want a man with that much baggage. I had my own baggage: five or six broken-zippered duffel bags crammed full of anvils. The last thing I needed was a man who wanted a lackey to lug his overstuffed set of Samsonite. And kids! No thank you. Me, a stepmother? Almost as implausible as me getting elected president of the United States. Being a stepmother required mothering skills, and it was up for debate whether or not I could even take care of myself. I alternated between adult and child on a daily basis. And then there was the age difference. When he was thirty-five, I’d still been on training wheels. Sure, he was my kind of guy, but it was becoming clearer every day that my kind of guy was not the kind of guy I should be with.
So, I frog-marched my attraction to the Playwright into a barricaded vault in the corner of my brain. I knew myself well enough to know that, despite all of my objections to him being a writer and actor, despite my horror of his children, had the Playwright been single, I would’ve thrown myself at him. With the reality as it was, though, the man was nothing I wanted to deal with. Unavailable. End of story.
I congratulated myself on my newfound maturity. I hadn’t fallen ridiculously for something I couldn’t have, just because he possessed a few traits that seemed ideal. I could be friends with him, and that would be great. I’d send him a letter, a puritanical letter that would absolve me of my embarrassing comment about a better class of men.
I got on the train the next morning and went back home to deal with the rest of my year. Maybe the next day, I’d meet the man I’d been waiting for. Or maybe not. I had nine months to go. Something better could happen at any moment. It couldn’t get any worse.
I was so, so wrong.
Le Petit Cornichon
In Which Our Heroine Learns that Nothing is Greener on the Other Side of the Pond…
“CAN I ASK YOU A FAVOR?” Baler leaned over the café table, a movie-star grin on his handsome, weathered face. I’d met him in line at the grocery store, forty-five minutes before, and now we were drinking espresso and eating sandwiches. He was from Cyprus. I’d never met anyone from Cyprus before, not too surprising, considering that they usually introduced themselves, as Baler had, as either Turkish or Greek. They assumed that, being an ignorant American, you wouldn’t know where Cyprus was. Not that he was wrong. I had only the vaguest notion of his home island floating in a romantic glittering sea. From the age of fourteen on, he told me, he’d gone to boarding school in Paris. The Eiffel Tower! Baguettes! The Sorbonne! All promising. And his name!
“A man made of honey,” he’d translated. Could it be any more appealing? Add the man made of honey to the homemade croissants I envisioned every time the word “Paris” was spoken, and I was ready to dine with Baler forever.
I envisioned French men—or really, any man not from the U.S.—as uber-romantic, evolved to the point of near-sainthood. Again, I was denying certain parts of world literature. Jean Genet, anyone? Not exactly known for his love stories. But never mind him.
Baler was a competitive bicyclist, so he was in terrific shape. He had black hair, and sea green eyes, and enough charisma to induce me to leave my grocery shopping behind and follow him to a coffee shop. Which was saying something. I’d been scavenging for lunch. The only food in my apartment was the remains of a roasted chicken belonging to Zak. Every few weeks, he’d come home with a couple of grocery bags and a smug look on his face. He’d spend the next several hours chortling to himself as he wedged a lemon into the chicken’s nether regions and inserted herbs beneath its skin.
“My chicken,” he’d sigh, blissed out. Vic preferred her chicken fried. I preferred my chicken inviolate.
Baler was giving me a questioning look. Well, whatever. A favor, to me, meant something minor.
“Of course I can,” I said, and then leaned in to see what I’d agreed to. Maybe it would be something wonderful, like, “Would you please sunbathe upon the deck of my boat, as we sail to Cyprus?” Or “Would you wear a black bikini and movie-star sunglasses, would you drink ouzo and eat olives, would you be embraced by my loving and nondysfunctional family?” Yes, I was ready to say. Yes, yes, yes! Yes, I’d ramble with the goats on picturesque hillsides. Yes, I’d dance on the tables, jingling my tambourine, and YES, I’d embrace the Mediterranean ancestry I didn’t have. I was ready to go.
These things, however, were not what Baler wanted. At all.
“DO YOU THINK that you could bite my penis?” Baler asked.
My vision of rambling with the goats short-circuited and became something not so appealing: bedding down with a satyr. I suddenly remembered other examples of the proclivities of foreign guys. Roman Polanski and his much-reviled film, Bitter Moon, for example. There’d been a notorious sex scene in that movie, involving a gorgeous French actress hopping around in a pig mask for the titillation of Peter Coyote. And what about Last Tango in Paris? Why had I thought that Americans had a monopoly on perversity? Bite his penis?
“I don’t think that I could, actually,” I said.
“You mean you won’t.”
“That, too.”
What kind of man wanted a woman to bite his penis on a first date? What kind of man wanted a woman to bite his penis ever?
Zak had a high-school horror story involving his girlfriend Rayna’s grandmother coming to the bedroom door to offer Zak and Rayna an after-school snack. She’d been a little late, considering that Rayna had already been engaged in giving Zak his very first experience with fellatio, on a set of bunk beds. When the door had opened, Zak, in terror, had lost his balance and fallen backward off the top bunk. Later, Rayna had told him he was lucky. When he, bruised and blue-balled, had asked why, she’d told him that her first impulse had been to hold on. With her teeth. Even years later, the retelling of this story still turned Zak green.
Baler was intelligent, no doubt about it. In the short time I’d known him, we’d had a conversation that had touched on Thomas Pynchon, Shakespeare, and string theory. I was bewildered. He’d seemed much too erudite for this kind of uber-visceral request. Not that there was any class of population known for their custom of genital mastication. It wasn’t a thing that you often found, for example, in the South. Or Latin America. Cockfighting, yes. Cockbiting, no.
Most men were terrified of teeth. They preferred to imagine you as some sort of Gummy Girl. Not that they wanted you in dentures. No. They wanted you hot. But they wanted the teeth to dematerialize the moment the mouth opened on the member.
“Hire a dominatrix,” I advised. “Or hit on someone who’s just had a bad divorce.”
“It’s not about that,” said Baler, his tone matter-of-fact. “When boys turn fourteen on Cyprus, their fathers take them to the Island of the Prostitutes.”
Island of the Prostitutes? Yeah, right.
“Here, we just give them a copy of Playboy, a thump on the back, and a good luck,” I said. “Most people lose their
virginity in car backseats, or in rumpus rooms.”
“What’s a rumpus room? A brothel? A strip club?”
“A basement. Belonging to someone’s parents.”
Baler looked disappointed.
“What’s the use of that? On Cyprus, everyone acknowledges that the male sex drive is superior. Women have to be protected. If they have sexual relations before marriage, they get emotionally attached. It’s biology.”
Ha. In my experience, men were much more likely than women to become enslaved to their emotions. And they were creative. In high school, my friend/nemesis Ira had written me a love letter on a roll of toilet paper, and delivered it to me during drama class. It had, essentially, been a single-ply litany of the ways I’d made him feel like crap. The note had concluded with an attempt to persuade me to show him my breasts, which Ira had been obsessed with basically since I’d grown them. (He continued to be, in fact, and I continued, somewhat out of habit, to deny him.) Not that I was immune to the unrequited crush. I’d had some hangdog moments in which the toy I’d been fetching had been thrown into the forest, and I’d emerged, panting happily, only to see the guy I’d been playing with leap into his car and drive away. In fact, usually, if I liked someone at all, that was exactly what happened. If I wasn’t into them, they invariably wanted to play fetch for the rest of our lives.
“All the girls of Cyprus are virgins until marriage, and their mothers guard the doors to make sure they stay that way. The prostitutes all wear black dresses, because they’re disgraced. Our fathers buy us each a day with one of them, and then leave us on the island without a boat, like Lord of the Flies.”