Heart of Glass (2 page)

Shopkeepers were hosing down the sidewalks, creating a putrid mist of trash and dog shit that wafted through the air as I headed for St. Mark's Place—a dilapidated hash of dive bars, hippie candle and incense joints, and record and book shops, interspersed with edgy leather- and spandex-filled clothing stores with names such as Search & Destroy and Trash and Vaudeville. The block was presided over by the ghosts of rock 'n' roll, living and dead, who haunted the now-boarded-up Electric Circus, a nightclub where the Grateful Dead, Nico, and the Velvet Underground had played in the sixties and seventies. On the other side of the street stood the St. Marks Baths, a gay all-hours playground for beautiful young men. The mysterious disease that would soon begin to kill many of them was then only just being whispered about, and the baths were still going strong. The corner of St. Mark's and Third Avenue seemed to belong to the Ramones—four hunched-over, pale guys dressed identically in white T's, jeans, leather jackets, and black high-top sneakers. They were there all the time that fall, their dark hair long over their eyes, which were hidden behind sunglasses—as if they were vampires shutting out the light of day.

I'd stopped at the Kiev, a grimy Ukrainian diner on Second Avenue, to pick up a bagel and a coffee to go for breakfast during the screening. I had already scoped out other inexpensive restaurants in the neighborhood. The Veselka, a Polish place a few blocks away, had huge bowls of borscht or chicken noodle soup that came with big buttered pieces of challah that would easily fill you up for the whole day. The Dojo, which I walked by on my way to school on Eighth Street, had a brown rice and vegetable plate that came with a delicious salmon-colored tahini dressing for a couple of dollars. I was a girl on a budget but quickly discovered I could eat well and cheaply on the Lower East Side. The simple food in heavy rotation became my version of a normal family's weekly menu, but
instead of Meat Loaf Monday and Taco Tuesday, it was Tahini Thursday and Pickle Soup Sunday. The flavors and smells, chipped china, and fat-­fingered waitresses were the grandparents' house and family dinner I'd never known growing up.

Crossing on Eighth Street over Lafayette and Broadway, I walked past the huge, black, metal cube sculpture in Astor Place that groaned as you spun it around on its axis. In the morning, the cube was surrounded by backpacking traveling kids in their sleeping bags, with a few homeless people strewn about snoozing. This encampment was usually broken up by the police midmorning, only to return later at night, after the drunk kids wandered home.

I cut down University Place. The theater where my class was held was on the far side of Washington Square
Park. Passing the elegant town houses with their gated stone staircases and shiny doors flanked by pristine window boxes of artfully arranged geraniums and ferns, I felt as if I were entering an Edith Wharton novel. But when I crossed the street and walked under the huge marble archway into the park, I left the genteel 1800s behind and entered a gritty, nefarious world straight out of
Serpico
. The lawns were bald and brown, trampled by stoned drug dealers and desperate addicts looking for a fix. Busking musicians, young couples making out, old men playing chess, and groups of black kids beating on upside-down white buckets for donations rounded out the park regulars. The rest of us—students, professors, and old Greenwich Village retirees—clutched our bags and moved swiftly across the sidewalks, trying not to stare. At night, we'd just walk around the park.

When I reached the south side of the square, I dashed up the stone steps to Vanderbilt Hall, where the movie theater was. I pushed the heavy swinging door open and felt an immediate calm. The familiar hush of the auditorium seemed to stop time. I settled into a shabby red-velvet seat in the back and waited for the lights to go down. It made me think of sitting in the audience with my sister when we were little, at Lincoln Center or the West End of London, or the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, squeezing hands until the moment darkness slowly fell and the show—
The Nutcracker
or
Mame
or a Shakespeare play our father was acting in—began.

“Keep your eyes peeled on the lights,” we'd tell each other as we waited for Daddy to come onstage as Andrew Aguecheek in
Twelfth Night
or as Trinculo in
The
Tempest
.

My parents had split up when I was seven. My father was an actor at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, and my mother left him for one of the founders, a wealthy producer named Oliver Rea. We lived in the Dakota and on Park Avenue for the brief period of their marriage and its aftermath. Then, fleeing ghosts of boyfriends, husbands, and lovers past and present, my mother essentially kidnapped my sister and me and took us to London. I didn't see my father or hear from or of him for ten years. We'd had a brief reunion just before my final fight with my mother, where I'd learned of her deception. While I had a strong emotional connection with my father, I had only spent three days with him out of the last three thousand six hundred or so. His house and second family didn't at this point qualify as “home.”

So for me, a theater, any theater, had become over the years a stand-in for home—a kind of sanctuary where I could invoke happier times. I had wound up in this one at NYU by accident, in a way, after my original career choice—acting—hadn't worked out.

I had wanted to go to theater school, but none of the schools I auditioned for would have me. Crushed, and lacking any kind of guidance, I spent a miserable year and a half at Boston University, studying whatever, just trying to get to my classes while what was left of my home life imploded: My little sister, Robin, became a runaway, my mother was ar
rested after drunkenly crashing Robin's high school graduation (literally, with her car), and I wrestled Mother into AA. When my sister escaped to college far away in the Midwest, I dropped out of BU and moved back home to babysit my crazy mom. I took a job working at a newsstand in Harvard Square, but missing the theater desperately, I lucked into a position at the American Rep, where I met Michael. He encouraged me to start taking photographs—even bought me a used Olympic SLR. Those pictures had gotten me into film school. The logic of it was loopy and half-assed, but, amazingly, it ended up being my ticket out of town and my mother's life.

I figured that if acting wasn't going to work out, perhaps I could find a way to be a filmmaker. Movies appealed to me the way the theater did—they were an escape, a journey to a different place where you could try on someone else's life for a few hours. But they also spoke to me in a language all their own—a collage of images, cuts, and focuses that I had always understood. My childhood had been a long series of changing locations, casts of characters, and dramatically shifting emotional levels. Movies gave me a way to see my world that made sense. When you grow up privy to conversations about infidelity, drugs, drinking, love, greed, and hatred in language you're too young to understand, it's the pictures that tell you the story. The packed suitcase in the foyer tells you all you need to know about the end of Mother's most recent fight with your stepfather.

The lights went down, and the musty-looking black cur
tains slowly creaked back, revealing the screen. In the dark, I heard the other students coughing, making hissing shush noises, and opening binder notebooks. The clacking whir of the projector started up in the booth. I popped the lid off my coffee and opened the wax paper wrapped around my still-warm bagel. The film was Antonioni's 1966
Blow-Up
, the story of a bad-boy fashion photographer in London who discovers he has inadvertently taken pictures of a murder while strolling through a park. I liked the film's self-­conscious beauty and expected it to be murder mystery, but then it evolved into a treatise on perception and reality. The hero, played by David Hemmings, has no concern or understanding for the world that surrounds him. Because he lives in a world of surfaces, where sex, love, and death are meaningless, he has difficulty discerning what's real and what isn't. It also has an amazing sound track by Herbie Hancock.

After school I walked home, thinking about how lost all the characters in the film were. They were numb with boredom and unhappiness, but at least they got to do it in Swinging Sixties London. It had been fun to see the city where I'd lived for five years, having teenage fun with my sister and our pack of friends while Mother partied and serial-dated, spending her divorce settlement. For years after we moved back to the States, I would draw diagrams of our flats so I would remember the places and times I missed so much. It had been a way to map my recent past, to remember where I had been.

I turned the key in the lock and opened my apartment
door to find Washington in full shooting stance, his gun pointed right at me.

“Shit!” I raised my book bag like a shield. Bernstein jumped out from behind the door. I was surrounded.

“You should have knocked,” Washington replied matter-of-factly.

“But I live here!” I sputtered.

Bernstein shook his head and headed for the sofa, uncocking his weapon. He seemed pissed off that he hadn't been able to use me for target practice. I looked around for Beth, but she was barricaded in her room.

“We have some forms we need you to sign; you'll most likely be subpoenaed after the suspect is apprehended and taken to trial.” Washington motioned with his gun to a pile of papers on the dining table while I wondered how close they'd come to blowing my head off. He holstered his weapon, took a pen out of his breast pocket, and clicked it, handing it to me with a flourish. “Here.” He pointed a thin, elegant finger to where he wanted me to sign my name. “And here.” His nails were perfect.

I went to my room and put my bag down on a red-painted wooden chair that I had picked up on the street one day. White flight, rotating students, musicians, and artists had made the downtown sidewalks into a kind of pop-up Salvation Army or Goodwill. I had put a filmy piece of pale green, patterned fabric over my one window. My futon was covered by an Indian-print tablecloth that I had bought at Pier 1. I had decorated the bare white walls with a few post
cards, photos, and some pictures I'd cut out of magazines. It was pretty sparse, but I hadn't been able to get much from my mother's house before I left. My last conversation with her had not gone well after I'd informed her that I was no longer planning to turn over my $50,000 college fund to her when I turned twenty-one. That money had been left to me by my grandfather, her father, who had obviously known there wouldn't be anything left to pay for college if she had access to it. So my records, clothes, winter coat, and all my other belongings were at her house, if she hadn't yet set fire to them in a fit of rage.

After doing some French homework and studying for a History of Film test, I jotted down some notes about
Blow-Up
to prepare for the paper I'd be writing. Michael was busy that evening, seeing a play he had an audition for to replace one of the actors. I didn't feel like spending the evening with Washington and Bernstein, so I decided to go to the movies.
The Man Who Fell to Earth
was playing at Cinema Village on East Twelfth Street, and as a big David Bowie fan, I didn't want to miss it. I'd always loved all the glitter-rock guys: Marc Bolan from T. Rex, Bryan Ferry from Roxy Music, and of course Bowie. Robin and I had even gone to his house in London, one day after school, and rung the doorbell, but ran away when the prospect of meeting our idol was too much for us to handle.

The movie theater was already dark when I slid into a seat with my dinner of fifty-cent popcorn. Only a few other people were in the audience. Bowie plays an alien who has
traveled to Earth to find water for his planet, where everyone is dying. He loses his way and becomes addicted to television and alcohol. Everyone on his planet, including his wife and children, perish while he rides around drunk in a limo. The movie was trippy, with eerily haunting images, and Bowie looked both ethereal and fantastic in tailored suits, with a soft brown fedora angled over his flame-orange hair. When the lights came up, I enjoyed the afterglow, those moments after a movie is over but you're still in its world.

“Are you by any chance wearing Givenchy Gentleman?” a man's voice asked from behind me. Still a bit dazed, I turned to see a skinny young guy with hazel eyes and a dark blond punky haircut. He was wearing a mustard-colored jacket flecked with purple and a black skinny tie with a red gingham shirt. He looked like a super cute Tintin.

“Yes, I am.” I had bought a small bottle of Givenchy Gentleman at the drugstore, after falling in love with its woodsy rose and leather scent. I smiled at him.

“Me, too.” He smiled back. “Did you like the movie?”

“Oh, I love David Bowie, so, yeah.”

“Do you wanna go get a cup of coffee?”

“Sure.”

We walked down the street to the nearest diner and sat at the counter, drank coffee, and traded life stories. Ben was twenty-two and had just graduated from college. He had moved to New York from middle-of-nowhere Texas and was working in an office downtown as a proofreader, until he figured out what he wanted to do with the rest of his
life. He lived in a tiny first-floor apartment with bars over its windows in Alphabet City, six blocks away.

I had this rushing, excited feeling as we talked, finishing each other's sentences and proclaiming a shared love for Blondie, Dashiell Hammett, French and Italian movies, and vintage clothing. I felt immediate kinship, an instant closeness that almost seemed as if we had met somewhere before, even though we hadn't.

My relationship with Michael was different, more straightforward and sexual. I looked up to him because he was older and wiser, and he'd opened up a world to me, buying me a camera and encouraging me to start my own life away from my mother. But because I had grown up without a father, and my mother was not just promiscuous but rapacious, going through lovers like a Chanel-clad, sex-crazed shark, I was somewhat unsure about the nature of relationships. Like David Hemmings's character in
Blow-Up
, my experiences of life were filtered. But instead of a camera lens it was my mother who had distorted my perceptions.
What was love? Compatibility? Good sex? The ability to stay up all night talking? Or to be able to be together and not say a word? I wasn't sure.