Looking for a Love Story (14 page)

PETE HADN’T WANTED
to attend Dad’s wedding. We were on spring vacation from our respective schools, and his physics teacher had offered to help him work on a project for some kind of statewide math-geek competition. But Alexandra had put her foot down.

“You’re going to see your father get married,” she’d informed Pete. “And you’re going to make nice. It’s good that someone’s finally making the man happy. Just as long as I don’t have to do it.” It was great that she felt that way—unless you were wishing that she’d be just a little jealous over the man who was the father of her children.

Sheryl’s three-ring circus of a wedding was everything my
mother had raised Pete and me to loathe. It featured two bands, a buffet for three hundred, and the bride looking gorgeous in a cream-puff dress, with the Girls as her attendants. As I said before, this collection of die-hard pals had been together since high school, and they would stick by one another through college, marriages, divorces, second marriages, finding God, therapy, illness, and, in one case, substance abuse. They also shared mani-pedi moments and the same trainer at their gym. They were an eye-opener for me; I had never met a group of women who shamelessly admitted that they never thought about world peace—or the plight of anyone they didn’t know personally. On the other hand, they were very sweet, so I tried not to judge.

Actually, I tried not to judge anything in Dad’s new life. Not his huge new house, that was almost an exact replica of the one in Rye but decorated in sherbet shades of chintz, or his new friends, who never seemed to notice when they were being sexist, or the fact that Sheryl insisted on referring to Alexandra as my Mommie even though by that point Pete and I had stopped calling her Mother and now referred to her as “Alexandra” because she felt it was more empowering for us. I didn’t judge any of it. Pete, on the other hand, spent most of our time in Sheryl’s cheery home rolling his eyes and making slips like, “When I get home to the United States … sorry, I mean New York—”

“I’ll win him over,” Sheryl said to me. “I’m good at that.”

She did eventually. But it took years. And his resistance had nothing to do with Alexandra … at least, it didn’t directly; it wasn’t about Pete protecting her honor or any of that. Sheryl just wasn’t the kind of woman Pete could appreciate when he was young. He’d grown up with a mother who was brilliant; a conversation with Alexandra could hopscotch from affirmative action, to gay rights, to the Supreme Court, to animal cruelty, to blood diamonds, without her breaking a sweat. By contrast, when Sheryl
went to England with Dad she wore a full-length mink coat, and as far as we could tell she never thought about its origins. Ditto for the diamond earrings Dad gave her. As for the Supreme Court, I’m not sure Sheryl knew what it was.

The differences between Sheryl and Alexandra didn’t end with political and global awareness. Alexandra’s idea of entertaining at home was to boil up a pot of pasta, dump some bottled sauce on it, and tell her guests to grab a seat on the floor. These fetes were known in her social circles as Alexandra’s Bad Spaghetti Nights. The ensuing discussions, fueled by some not-very-good wine, would become loud and impassioned and last until three in the morning. My mother would tell funny stories about the judges she argued in front of and the pols she worked with; her imitation of Mayor Giuliani was considered one of the best in the city. When Sheryl had a dinner party, a caterer cooked, a maid served, and finger bowls were involved. After the meal the sexes would separate to opposite sides of the living room to chat, which usually led to some comment from Pete about women binding their feet, which no one but Dad and I actually got.

I understood where Pete was coming from; there was no contest between our mother and the woman who had replaced her when it came to wit or worthy thoughts. And Alexandra was a good mother—she saw to it that Pete and I could use the Dewey decimal system the second we could spell the word
library
, and as soon as we were old enough to cross the street on our own we had memberships to the Metropolitan Museum, MOMA, the Museum of Natural History, and the New-York Historical Society. We saw Shakespeare in the Park every summer and
The Nutcracker
every Christmas. Alexandra also taught us both to play a mean game of poker.

But Sheryl had our father.

In addition to dressing badly and not allowing makeup to touch
my face, I stayed faithful to my mother’s ideals by refusing to learn any of Sheryl’s homemaking skills—if I’m honest, that stuff really did bore the hell out of me—but I have to admit I was touched by the fresh flowers that showed up on the table next to my bed when I was in California. And I liked the embroidered hand towels in the bathrooms, and the special meals Sheryl made for me that were low calorie without tasting like it, so I always lost weight during the summer. I even enjoyed the spa days Sheryl planned. I liked the fancy robes they gave us, and the tiny lunch on the pretty china, and most of all I loved the idea that a dollop of avocado cream would make me into a raving beauty.

As far as Pete was concerned, Dad’s domestic tranquillity could never outweigh Sheryl’s deficiencies in the brains department. “What the hell can he find to
talk
about with her?” Pete would demand. “Doesn’t he go out of his mind?”

There were times when you could see that Dad wished she read more than celebrity and fashion magazines. But it didn’t really matter to him all that much. As I watched Sheryl smile her way through her orderly days, planning her pretty dinner parties and keeping her legs in shape, I knew she was a success at the one thing my mother had never mastered. I tried to learn a life lesson from that, but where the Sheryl model left me with my fabulous language skills, no discernible domestic ability, and not-so-taut inner thighs I had no idea. So I learned the wrong lesson. I didn’t figure out that Sheryl was genuinely loving and caring and that was why she made my Dad happy. I thought the lesson was, You’ve got to pet your man like a Pekinese.
Thank you, Chicky, for pointing that out
.

I’D REACHED MY
neighborhood. There was an electronics store on the corner where I was hoping to buy an old-fashioned tape recorder. Like most people, I’d gone digital in the last few years,
but I was going to need a recorder in order to listen to Chicky’s cassettes. The saleschild in the store was stunned to discover that her employers carried such an antique and listened in horrified admiration as I explained about the dark ages when I was a kid and we had to depend on video players and Walkmans for our instant entertainment. I left the store feeling very strong, like a survivor of a tougher, leaner age.

I continued feeling that way until I was in my apartment and heading down the hallway to my office. That was when I looked inside the grocery bag and realized that Chicky hadn’t given me her check. Again. Now I wasn’t sure what to do. According to all the ghostwriter websites I’d read, I shouldn’t work until I had my first payment in hand. But I knew that my already shaky confidence would deflate like a defective pool toy if I had to wait to get started. Besides, Chicky had said she had faith in me.

I called Yorkville House, but of course, Chicky was off doing her thing with the Swinging Grandmas. I told myself it was understandable that she’d forgotten my money in the flurry of leaving her room. I left a message, asking her to put the check and the contract in the mail ASAP, and then I continued on my way to my office. Well, I
said
I’m a sucker for people who say they have faith in me. And I have that core of marshmallow fluff.

As soon as I walked into my home office, nasty flutters started in my stomach. The room itself was great; it was the brightest in the apartment and had a partial view of the park. But I’d spent too many miserable hours in there and had suffered too many defeats. “I can’t work in here,” I told Annie, who had accompanied me on the trek down the hall. Then I realized that I didn’t have to.

Before I met Jake, I used to write on my laptop in bed. We’d set up my office because, during my desperate phase when I was trying to work through the nights, I kept Jake awake. But now the only beauty sleep I’d be disturbing was Annie’s. She has slept
through parades, fire alarms, and the time the former sitcom star who lived in our building tried to drive his Maserati through the lobby after a weekend of partying.

It took a couple of hours to move my bookcases and filing cabinets into the bedroom, but when I was finally on the bed, propped up with every pillow and cushion I owned, with my computer in my lap, the tape recorder plugged in, a huge glass of cold Diet Coke on my nightstand, and two chocolate bars at my side, I felt … not exactly brimming with confidence, but less fluttery.

“There are perks to living alone,” I informed Annie.

(I know every newly single person discovers that, so it’s not exactly a startling life lesson, but they don’t all have to be eureka moments—do they?)

Annie seemed pleased to be in the bedroom with me. I don’t think she’d ever liked my office, with the slick furniture our decorator and Jake loved; it was too slippery for canine napping. Annie had hung out in the office with me because the Good Dog Manual dictated that she stick to me like Velcro when I was in trouble, and whenever I opened the computer—the source of all evil, as far as she was concerned—she knew trouble was on the way. But the bedroom was much more to her liking. I’d persuaded the decorator to let me have a couple of cushy chairs in there, and a plush carpet, and Annie’s bed was tucked away in the corner.

Annie’s hackles went up briefly when she saw me take the Evil Laptop out of its case, and she did a little free-form growling at the tape recorder, just to let it know who was boss, but then she settled down next to me on the bed to keep her vigil.

It was time for me to get to work. There was an envelope in the grocery bag that had pictures in it. I put them on the bed next to me, said a quick prayer to whatever goddess handles female writers, unwrapped a chocolate bar, and turned on the tape recorder. Chicky’s voice filled the room.

CHAPTER 13

“First, you’re going to get a little history lesson, Doll Face,” said Chicky, in her husky growl, “because you’ve got to understand what vaudeville
was
. I always think vaude, as they called it, was the real American show business. It hit big around the time when all the European immigrants were coming to this country—from around 1900 on. You had the Irish, the Italians, the Greeks, the Slovaks, the Germans, and the Jews from Russia and Poland. They all settled together in a big noisy mass in cities like New York and Chicago. It wasn’t easy, but they were hopeful people with big dreams. That’s why they came.”

As Chicky talked, I pictured the areas of New York as I knew them today: Little Italy; Chinatown; the Lower East Side, where the Jewish families had settled at the turn of the last century; Hell’s Kitchen, which had been mostly Irish; and Yorkville, where the Germans had lived. I tried to imagine those neighborhoods the
way they must have been when they were teeming with people who came from different cultures and spoke different languages, all of them trying to make their way and give their kids a better life than they had had back home. What kind of courage or craziness did it take to stick it out in the American melting pot?

“Vaudeville was the immigrants’ entertainment,” Chicky went on. “You had Irish acts, Italian acts, ‘Dutch’ acts—performed in a German accent with German characters—and Jewish acts. There were African Americans working in vaudeville, starring in their own routines at a time when the best they could hope for on the legit stage was a bit part playing a servant. People learned about other nationalities in those vaudeville houses, even when the actors were making fun. You take a greenhorn from Amalfi, a kid who’s only been in this country a couple of months and never met anyone who wasn’t Italian. You bring him to the theater, and he sees an Irish act doing a clog waltz. A couple of minutes later, the Irish kid sitting next to him watches an Italian act doing the tarantella.” Chicky laughed on the tape. “Hell, vaudevillians could have taught those bozos at the United Nations a thing or two.”

I turned off the tape recorder. Once again, I could picture it: performers from all those different backgrounds, standing in the wings waiting to make their entrances. I could hear them murmur final instructions to one another:
Remember to wait for that laugh. Don’t rush the last chorus of the song
. Then they’d say a quick prayer in Polish, or Yiddish, or whatever language they’d heard around the house when they were children. I thought about my mother, the self-proclaimed mutt. I thought of my own mixed bag of American forebears. And for the first time since I’d finished
Love, Max
I felt connected to the material I was going to write.

That’s when writing is a joy. Please don’t ask me to explain this, because I’m damned if I can. I turned the tape recorder back on.

“Good vaude had something for everyone,” Chicky went on. “Animal acts, acrobats, dancers, singers, kid acts with a bunch of youngsters cutting up and doing stunts, and flash acts—those were the big numbers with chorus girls singing and dancing. There were novelty acts, like sideshows at the circus—Siamese twins and the double-jointed man, things like that. But the cream, the thing that really made vaudeville what it was, were the comedy acts: Burns and Allen, the Marx Brothers, Buster Keaton, Milton Berle. They all started out in vaudeville.