Heart of Glass (21 page)

One morning after I had slept over at Ned's place, he was in the shower. His roommate, Ken, was making coffee in the kitchen—I helped myself and thanked him. Walking around Ned's small bedroom looking for my shoes, I saw his wallet. Without thinking, I picked it up, opened it, and looked at his driver's-license picture. He looked super cute. I set down my coffee mug and looked inside the fold, thinking I'd slide out a couple bucks to make a joke when he got back about hoping he'd had a good time. A few twenties were in the billfold slot, but I saw something else. I pulled out a small photograph of a young woman, beautiful with dark long hair and a beaming smile, wearing a yellow sweater with a locket hung around her neck. Behind the photo was a clipping from a newspaper in San Francisco. The same photo I held in my hand appeared in the article. I read that she was an ACT student who'd been offered a ride home from her movie usher job by a coworker. He had murdered her and
dumped her body by the side of the road. My hands tingled as I read about how they'd searched for her for days before finding her body. I looked at the picture. Who was she? Why did Ned have a picture of her and a clipping about her murder in his wallet? Was she his girlfriend? Why hadn't he told me about her?

I didn't hear the shower turn off. I was standing next to his bed looking at this girl's smiling face when Ned walked in wearing a towel. He saw me, and I looked at him. Because it was so strange, I didn't feel embarrassed about being such a snoop.

“Who is this?” I felt a little flipped out.

“She was a very good friend of mine.” He started to get dressed, pulling on his usual all-black ensemble.

“Was she your girlfriend?” It seemed so bizarre to me. I thought we were so close, and he suddenly had this huge secret. A secret he carried with him in his pocket every day.

“No. We were close.”

I put the picture and the clipping back in his wallet. “Why didn't you tell me about her, about this?” I didn't understand. I was jealous and hurt—how could I compete with a dead girl?

“I'm going to have to go back next week to the inquest.”

“Okay.” I gulped, trying to comprehend how he and I could be together all the time and he'd decided not to say anything until I looked in his wallet. Would he even have told me if I hadn't found the photo? “It's just . . . I'm surprised, that's all.”

He didn't respond.

A week later, I drove him to the airport—he was heading to San Francisco for the inquest. I told him to call me. I waited to hear from him that evening but never did. I was worried and would have called him if I'd known how to reach him.

The next day at school, during voice class, there was a fire drill. We all spilled out onto the street. I saw Ken, Ned's roommate, and ran over to him to ask if he'd heard from Ned. He said Ned'd left a garbled message on the answering machine. Then he glanced around shiftily, lowering his voice to a whisper. “Ned really wants to be alone. He doesn't want anyone to know where he is. And he told me he was afraid he'd hurt your feelings by telling you.”

“Um . . . all right.” My mind was reeling—Ned's weaselly roomie as the messenger in our relationship? What the hell was going on?

“I'd be happy to keep you posted if I hear anything.”

“I don't understand.”

“He said he'd talk to you when he gets back.”

Ken smiled and looked at me with saccharine, insincere sympathy. I walked away, trying not to burst into tears.

When we got back inside the building, I saw my classmate Adam, who'd been at ACT the year before with Ned and the dead girl, leaning on the soda machine outside the bathrooms. I walked over to him and asked in a quiet voice if he'd known her that well. It turned out that Adam had been close to her—I remembered seeing his name in the
clipping in Ned's wallet. Looking pained, Adam told me some things that made me feel uneasy. He said that Ned hadn't been that close to her, that he wanted to be, but she wasn't interested.

“We were both in love with her. It was so fucking horrible when they found her.”

I nodded.

“She would have been in our class, you know. But she's not here.”

Then Adam looked at me gravely—as if he wanted to say something, but wasn't sure he should.

“What is it?” I reached out and touched his arm.

He ran his slender fingers through his hair and looked off down the hallway. “It's just that . . . well, we were really tight, and . . .”

“Tell me.”

“You remind me of her.”

“But she had dark hair and—”

“No, I mean, you're like her. The first time I saw you, talked to you, watched your audition pieces—that's what I thought. It's really weird. You have the same sort of, I dunno . . . talent and openness that she had.” He shook his head. “Ned always goes after the shiniest thing in the room. This time it's you.”

I didn't know what to say to this. Feeling sick to my stomach, I took the elevator downstairs. I walked the streets for a few hours, bewildered, wondering what the fuck was going on. Did he love me? Or did he love the part of me that
reminded him of her? Did I love him? Was he even in San Francisco? All of a sudden I felt as if I were in some creepy Brian De Palma movie.

I thought about how strongly Ned had come on to me when we first met, all the compliments, and the wildly inappropriate comment he'd made in the library about my ­period, which had thrown me at the time, but now seemed like a manipulation—something he'd said to make me feel vulnerable, and in awe of him, as if he could read my mind. In rehearsals for the play, he only said positive things about my work, whereas I worried that I wasn't learning or growing in the role. All the weird sex problems and the murdered girl in his wallet. Suddenly, he seemed false to me, and I didn't feel I could trust him. It was as if it were all a mirage.

When Ned got back, I didn't tell him about my conversation with Adam. He didn't say anything about the inquest, and I didn't ask. Instead, I told him that I thought we should take a break. It was too much, going to school, rehearsing the play. I had to start working harder—there were so many distractions, and I wasn't taking it seriously enough. I told him I was overwhelmed and needed some time to myself.

He listened patiently and nodded. “Okay. If that's the way you feel.”

I was surprised he'd taken it so well. I expected more of a fight.

But that night, when I got back to my apartment, I saw Ned's car driving slowly down my block as I made my way inside, and my answering machine was full of hang-up calls.

Meanwhile, Graham and I had been spending a lot of time together, rehearsing and running lines for
The Glass Menagerie
. In the wake of this weirdness with Ned, I kept thinking back to the time Graham had told me he had a thing for me. He'd stop by my place for a cup of coffee or we'd pop out for drinks. We had a lot of laughs, and though I didn't know if he still cared for me that way, I found myself wondering more and more if he did.

One night, after a rehearsal in my kitchen, Leslie left and Graham lingered. I told him that I thought about him a lot. He said he still felt the same way he had back when we were scene partners. We discussed it all in a logical, grown-up way—and decided we shouldn't get involved, just remain friends. He'd had a bad breakup recently, and I had just dumped Ned. It seemed best not to plunge into a relationship when the rose garden was littered with our victims.

Rehearsals complete, we performed
The Glass Menagerie
and received a fair amount of criticism. Ethan felt that I was too resilient as Laura. I had been too afraid to go too far with the character's disability. I didn't want her to be a victim. Allen said that it was a “tragic mistake” to have made in my performance. But he praised other things and he cried through a couple of scenes, so I thought he'd been moved a little.

“This is the place where Wendy should be allowed to branch out and play roles of depth and power! Not wallflower parts,” our voice teacher, Bonnie, said somewhat angrily, zeroing in on what would become one of my biggest
challenges at school, and my bête noire: I was in jeopardy of being typecast as ingenues because of my height and sweet appearance. My whole life, people had called me “flower” or “butterfly” or patted me on the head as if I were a kitten.

I often felt that I shared something with Bonnie: we were both little people who were big inside and pissed off about the way other people saw us and treated us because of our size. When I had performed a monologue from
Romeo and Juliet
for David Hammond, an expert teacher of interpreting Shakespeare, he told me that it was “cute.” That was all—dismissing me in one little, and little-sounding, word. I was furious and embarrassed, trying to pretend I didn't care what he'd said even as my face turned red and my ears prickled with anger.

After the feedback on
The Glass Menagerie
, I was determined to change the faculty's perception of me by working in scene class on ballsy women—Marlene in Caryl Churchill's
Top Girls
, a cutthroat executive who's given her child to her housewife sister to raise; Irene in
Idiot's Delight
, a pathological liar and con artist; even Shakespeare's Cleopatra, who was larger-than-life and a drama queen. I also started working with Bonnie, when we both had time, on a
Richard III
speech that was filled with fury and darkness.

“This is some of the best work I've seen you do, Wendy.” She beamed at me. “I see all the rage inside the character, and your voice dropped to a lower octave as well! Excellent.”

I kept working away at showing my range as an actress, praying it would make a difference onstage.

During a sunny January after projects were over, our Alexander teacher, MJC, had a big bash at his house, to celebrate surviving projects. It was loud and boozy—everyone was letting off steam. We'd all been under so much pressure. I was standing in the hall outside the bathroom, talking with MJC and nursing a Jack Daniel's when Graham walked by. MJC reached out to take Graham's arm and dragged us both into the bathroom with him. I was confused, until MJC spoke.

“You two are such special people. You should really be together.”

Without another word, he walked out, closing the door behind him. Graham and I looked at each other for a long moment. Then we fell into each other's arms, tumbling onto the cold tile floor.

I worried that, like my mother, I was going through men at tramplike speed—but I was searching for something real. A true love. I'm sure many people looked at me and thought,
Slut
. But I was filled with hope each time. For me, it wasn't about sex—it was about finding the love and acceptance I'd never had. Not knowing what to look for in a guy, I gravitated toward the ones who seemed to want me. I figured that was half the battle—getting some man to hanker for me—so if he did already, why not give it a go?

Graham and I were happy, at the start. He had a great sense of humor and would play silly practical jokes on me. We'd make pancakes and eat them in bed. He was kind of pent up sexually, and I felt that I could help him be more relaxed and have more fun. He'd grown up in Sonoma, with WASPy, stern parents who didn't support his decision to be an actor. I felt comfortable with him, maybe because we'd been friends first. I wished sometimes he could be more affectionate, more giving—but I thought that would come in time. I blamed his starchy upbringing for his inability to express his emotions. I also blamed myself for his reticence in showing his feelings for me; maybe it was my fault that he didn't want to French-kiss or go down on me. It was as if he thought sex was dirty, but maybe he just needed more time to be intimate in that way.

One evening a few weeks into our romance, we were at the Oxford Hotel, a fancy hotel in downtown Denver, having a drink, when he told me I was the only woman he felt he didn't have to charm the pants off. Was it that he could relax around me and be himself, or was I so easy he didn't have to work so hard? With his good looks, I couldn't see how hard it would be to get any woman to fall into bed with him. His smile, the husky magnetism of his delivery, made me feel special—it was a compliment, right? But after a beat and a slug of my bourbon, I wondered what it meant.

•   •   •

Suddenly at school they dropped a bomb on us. The artistic director, Donovan Marley, called a big meeting with the entire class, Allen Fletcher, all the teachers and the administration and told us that our class would be cut in half at the end of the year, after our final projects—from twenty-four to twelve. Our only previous interaction with Donovan had been when he threatened the kids who were late with their tuition payments. When Anna, who was working nights as a waitress to put herself through the program asked what would happen if they couldn't come up with the money, he snarled through clenched teeth, “I'm not the kind of person to be handed ultimatums. I'll close this goddamn school down!”

He was a real charmer.

Donovan claimed that reducing the class was a way to save money; the theater didn't want to waste time and talent on those who weren't cut out to be career actors. We were stunned, having been told that we'd be together for the three years. Allen looked as if he were going to throw up, and Ethan stood up and said, “This is fucking bullshit!”—and stormed out of the room, slamming the door behind him. People were crying, shaking, and hanging on to one another. Though I didn't show as much outwardly, I was devastated by this threat to the new home and family I'd found.

After that day—dubbed Black Thursday by all of us, who felt as if our front teeth had been punched out—we all walked around in a daze, feeling doomed and breathing what felt like poisoned air inside the building. Initially, we
had bonded and functioned as a group, but now it seemed we were expected to pit ourselves against each other, to compete to be “the best.” I couldn't help but wonder who was going to get the ax, who I thought deserved it, and who didn't. Would I be cut? And what would the ratio be? Five women and seven men? Six of each? It changed everything in an instant; I felt the tenuousness of my position in the class and was more determined than ever to shine as best I could. I prayed that I would get a plum role in final projects, where I could strut my stuff and impress the faculty.