Heart of Glass (3 page)

“Have you ever been to the opera?” Ben asked. We were eating french fries and gravy that he had ordered. I confessed to him that I had not.

“Then you'll go with me, as my guest.” He beamed at me over the glistening pile of potatoes.

“Really?” The opera made me think of powdered wigs and lorgnettes.

He told me that he had box seats for Mozart's
Don Giovanni
at the Met in two weeks. He said that the opera was such a pure expression of beauty and truth that I had to experience it. I looked at the clock on the wall. It was 4:00 a.m.

“Will you come?”

“Um . . .” My mind suddenly turned to Michael, who probably wouldn't want me to go to the opera with another man. Still, I felt drawn to Ben in an almost friendish, innocent way. “Can I call you?”

“No.” He wrote down the date and time of when I was to meet him at Lincoln Center on a napkin and handed it to me. “Here. If you don't want to come, don't show up.” He looked me in the eye.

He explained to me that he didn't have a phone, so we'd either meet in two weeks at the Met—or not.

“Okay.” I nodded. It was kind of like a game, and it made me like him even more.

The sun was just peeking up behind the buildings when Ben walked me home. The garbage trucks had hit the streets, loudly whining and grinding up the trash as the men hurled it into the backs.

“Good night,” he said at my building. He kissed my hand and walked back toward Alphabet City.

I took my key out and walked up the three flights to my front door. I was about to put the key in the lock when I stopped. “Washington, Bernstein, don't draw your guns, it's me, Wendy,” I called out.

I let myself in and found them camped out on the couch.

“Where the hell have you been?” Washington asked. “We were worried about you, girl.”

“I went to a movie, then out for coffee.”

“Coffee?! Till dawn?!” Washington looked incredulous. “With that boyfriend of yours?”

“No, just with someone I met at the movies.”

“There's just no one looking out for you, is there?” Bernstein chipped in, shaking his head.

“You are.” I smiled.

“Well, we have good news and bad news,” said Washing­ton, getting up, stretching, and adjusting his cuff links.

The good news was that Harvey had been spotted in Florida at a gas station while he was filling up his rental car. The bad news was that today while the police were questioning the landlord, it came out that he didn't know Harvey had rented out rooms in the apartment. He told the cops that Beth and I were illegal tenants and we had to be out in twenty-four hours. I asked if Beth knew, and they said she did.

Now what? Clearly, I wouldn't be getting my deposit back from a man who was on the lam from the mob. My school tuition was covered by the money my grandfather had left me—just enough for a degree as long as I didn't switch schools again. My bank account had about $200 in it.

To cover my deposit for Harvey, I had already sold the monogrammed Louis Vuitton overnight bag my mother had bought me. I had taken it to a swanky leather shop on the
Upper East Side, but the owner had sniffed at me and said he wasn't interested. Luckily, a man from Texas who'd just broken loose from an executive retreat at the Waldorf had overheard our conversation and followed me out of the store.

“The little lady is going to love this!” Tex chuckled as his piggy fingers peeled off five twenties from a huge wad of cash.

The bag had my initials on it, and I wanted to ask what his wife's name was. Wanda? Wilhelmina? I wasn't sad to see it go. It matched my sister's and was very much the sort of thing Mother thought we should have. A status-symbol suitcase for those weekends in Paris. Those days were long over—along with the limo rides, the Broadway shows, the fancy hotels, and the posh addresses of my once-privileged girlhood.

Since it now looked as if I would be needing more money, I went back out to look for a place to sell a few items from my modest jewelry collection. I had considered calling the bank in Kansas City to ask for some cash from my college fund—but decided that my trust officer, the dour and disapproving Mr. Charno, would think that my story about the NYPD coming through my front door searching for a roommate running from the Mafia would sound too much like one of my mother's zany fabrications designed to suck the account dry.

WE BUY GOLD!
the sign promised as I entered the grimy, little vestibule of the pawnshop, a few blocks from my apartment on lower Broadway. The greasy carpeting and smeared
bulletproof glass created the ambience of an impending crime. I placed a gold chain and a gold bracelet with a little French-flag charm in the sliding tray in the wall to be tested and weighed by the sullen, doughy-faced man on the other side of the window. Both pieces had been gifts from my ex-stepdad. The necklace had been presented to me at Sardi's on my sixteenth birthday, and my ex-stepdad had purchased the bracelet at Cartier during a trip to Paris when I was twelve. My ex-stepdad, or Pop as my sister and I called him, was living comfortably somewhere on the Upper East Side, but after years of paying our private-school tuition and bailing my mother out of various jams long after they'd divorced, he had tired of her gold-digging shenanigans and had finally cut her off completely. He was just another in a long line of bridges Mother had burned. Ultimately, all her relationships turned toxic, and I thought that through guilt by association Pop wouldn't be happy to receive a plea for financial help from me.

The pawnshop man snatched up my jewelry. “You sure you want to sell these?” His dead eyes stared at me from behind the glass. I smiled and nodded, thinking that if I appeared cheerful and not desperate, he'd give me a better price. He just shrugged.

When I was younger and we needed money, my mother had often resorted to selling something—an emerald ring, the grand piano, or the Rodin sculpture she'd gotten in her divorce settlement from Pop. That way she wouldn't have to—heaven forbid—go out and get a job. She'd even once
talked one of her boyfriends into buying us a new washing machine, though I never saw her do a load of laundry. She wasn't the domestic type.

“I'll give you seventy-five bucks.”

“Each?” I was hoping that was what he meant.

“No, for both.”

Deflated, I nodded and took the money. This and the two hundred in my bank account could get me a new room and maybe a month to find some kind of part-time job. I was sad to part with these fond little trinkets from my girlhood, but it seemed, in a way, Pop was still helping me.

•   •   •

That evening I was meeting Michael at McHale's, an actor hangout on Eighth Avenue in the theater district. I emerged from the Times Square subway station, breathing the familiar stench of a thousand uncleaned urinals. Trash whirled through the air like dirty confetti. All the taxis seemed to be honking in unison, while the hookers, autograph hounds, three-card monte hustlers, break-dancers, and the rest of the rabble competed for their share of the sidewalks. I walked up Eighth Avenue, past peep shows, the shoe-shine guys, bo­degas, and stores selling sex toys and X-rated videos. A balding man with glasses in a shiny, cheap suit and scuffed Florsheim wing tips careened into me as he slipped out of a dirty-movie theater, clutching his briefcase and a giant pack of diapers, clearly in a hurry to get to Port Authority and the express bus back to New Jersey and his family.

With its frilly tartan curtains, old wooden bar, and Naugahyde booths, McHale's had a certain sad, crappy charm. You could imagine some poor bastard really crying into his beer here. It was always packed with up-and-­coming actors, stage stars, has-beens, union set and prop guys, and local drunks. The food was middling but inexpensive, and the drinks were big and cheap. Michael was sitting at a table in the back, talking to a couple of other guys—actors, I guessed.

Before I met him at the theater in Cambridge, Michael had been in a successful Broadway play for three years, but times had been lean since then. He'd been working putting up drywall and had bought an apartment on the Upper West Side, fixing it up as an investment. His career had stalled, and he had been relying more on the construction work, which frustrated him. I approached the table and sat down, but they were busy talking shop: who was being seen for the new Arthur Miller play, how hard it was to get in to see a certain hot casting director, who was getting his or her teeth capped or a nose job, and what a prick Hal Prince was. I ordered a cheeseburger and waited for my turn to talk. I often felt, when out with Michael's friends, that I was invisible. Everyone else talked a lot, but I was afraid to open my mouth, in case it made me look stupid, so usually I didn't. Maybe because I was the youngest person by far at the party or the bar or the restaurant when we went out together, I lacked the courage and the confidence to join in the fray. I thought of
Manhattan
, a movie I'd seen in Boston
the year before on a date, because I was the exact opposite of Mariel Hemingway's character, Tracy. Although Tracy is dramatically younger than her boyfriend, played by Woody Allen, and his crowd, she is enormously self-possessed and articulate, comfortable wherever she is. I wished I could be more like her, but lacking her assuredness and brio, I preferred to be a wallflower, hoping that I wouldn't be noticed or called upon.

After about fifteen minutes, Michael's actor pals patted him on the back and drifted away toward the bar. He told me how his auditions had gone and jokingly asked how Washington and Bernstein were. I filled him in about Harvey, the eviction, and my imminent homelessness. He didn't say anything, just nodded and stirred his scotch on the rocks with a little red plastic straw. I thought about telling him about Ben, but realized just in time that he would only be needlessly jealous. So I just told him about the movie, which he said sounded like a snooze. He didn't like David Bowie anyway.

Afterward, we strolled down Restaurant Row toward Times Square to look at the lights and do some people watching—something most actors love to do. Jazz music drifted out from the saloon doors along the street, scrawny trees rasped their branches together, and waiters on their breaks, dressed in black pants and white shirts, smoked cigarettes on the stoops. We turned the corner and, a few blocks down, ducked into Playland, so Michael could play
Space Invaders
.

The arcade was jammed with people, mostly young males, leather-clad street types with greased-back hair or disco-suited preeners in high-heeled boots with their shirts open to expose all their cheap gold chains. They were showing off to their drinking buddies or to their scantily clad, big-haired girlfriends. Pressed shoulder to shoulder hunched over the game cabinets, they jerked and flipped the buttons on the control panels, the screens throwing a ghoulish green glow over their faces. Loud beeping, buzzers, and bells all wailed simultaneously, and overhead speakers blared “Ladies' Night” by Kool and the Gang. There were whoops of victory or fist-pumping when someone made a big score or blew the most heads off. It smelled like old fry-pit oil and BO and made me feel dirty just standing there.

“I think you should move in with me!” Michael suddenly shouted toward me over the din, his hand smacking the firing button about a hundred times a minute as he killed electronic aliens.

“What?!” I wasn't sure I'd heard him correctly.

“You should move in with me!”

“Maybe!” I yelled back. The truth was I didn't want to move in with him. Having just escaped my mother's house, I wanted to be independent. But I was stuck and had less than a day to find another place to go.

“But I don't want you to feel like you have to ask me! I could probably crash on a couch somewhere until I figure something else out!” I had only two friends living in the city—women I'd met at BU—both of whom had transferred
here. Jenny Ott was a native New Yorker who lived with her boyfriend, Pete Homer, and two roommates; and Julie was a vegetarian meatpacking heiress who was now studying painting at the School of Visual Arts.

Michael looked up at me from the popping, crablike images moving across the screen. “I want you to move in! I love you!” he practically screamed in my face.

“You do?!” I yelled back over the general cacophony. Suddenly I felt as if my throat were closing up. I cared about Michael, but wasn't sure I loved him—or even what that meant.

Michael leaned over, kissed me, and smiled. “Of course I do! Now cheer up and play some
Space Invaders
!” He shoved more coins into the slot.

“I'm terrible at stuff like this!” I said apologetically. The noise in the arcade was ear piercing, and I was starting to feel claustrophobic from all the bodies and the din. I just wanted to leave. I tried to play the game, but I was awful. I couldn't hit anything. “See?! I can't do it!” I looked at Michael and threw up my hands.

“Try again!”

“Really?!” I replied weakly, trying to think of a way to end this. I could pretend to faint—or vomit maybe.

“Wendy”—he shook his head at me, frowning slightly—“if you can't play a video game, how do you expect to play the game of life?!”

I couldn't believe he was serious, and my mouth dropped open a little. “It's just a stupid game, Michael! Can't we go?!”

I could tell he was irritated, but he took my hand and we left. I felt embarrassed at my clumsiness, but at the same time I wondered why he was treating me like a naughty little kid. Maybe because I was acting like one.

We walked out onto the smelly, crowded street on our way to the subway, past the transvestites, the break-­dancers, and the Jesus freaks who wore
REPENT
signs—all the ­humanity lit up by the marquees of myriad porno theaters. Michael was going uptown, I was going downtown. After
we went through the turnstile, I reached out and touched his arm.