Angels All Over Town Read online

I sat beside him on the cozy rose-red banquette and popped fish eggs against the roof of my mouth with my tongue. Chance’s perfect hand rested on the tablecloth beside mine. His nails were clipped straight across; he wore a weighty gold crest ring on his pinky finger. Occasionally he would turn to smile at me, and I would see a softness in his wolf eyes. I found myself leaning forward, to see whether he wore a wedding band on his left hand. He didn’t, but I knew that meant nothing. Many Juilliard professors were married and didn’t wear rings. With dessert we had Russian tea in a glass, and I found myself in the middle of an elaborate fantasy. Chance Schutz would take me to his apartment in his limousine and invite me upstairs to continue discussing his offer. We would lounge on a glove-soft leather sofa. I envisioned yards of heavy brocade draperies at the floor-to-ceiling windows, soft lamplight, classical music on the stereo. Chance would say, “If you want the part, there is only one thing that you must do…”

  Instead he handed me cab fare and told me to think things over. Then he hurried off to meet his wife, who taught a pottery class at the New School, leaving me to pocket the money and take a subway home. Riding through the tunnel beneath Seventh Avenue, I tried not to think about my fantasy. Only a daughter of James Cavan would expect sex demands from every man she met. I felt ashamed of myself. Chance Schutz cared about artistic matters, not sleeping with actresses. He had described in loving detail the sort of pots his wife created: huge, cockeyed things that looked like umbrella stands and spittoons. I began a new fantasy in which Beyond’s cast members were like a family, with Chance Schutz and his wife as the loving, benevolent parents. Before I reached my stop at Seventy-second and Broadway, I had already made my decision: I would take a screen test for Beyond the Bridge as soon as Chance Schutz could arrange it.

  We set it up for the following Tuesday. I walked from my apartment to the studio on West Fifty-sixth Street, growing more nervous with each passing block. I was to read a scene with Stuart MacDuff, the actor who played Paul Grant, Delilah’s soap opera father. Paul Grant was a former bank president as well as the mayor of Mooreland. Delilah, his middle and favorite daughter, had run away from home five years earlier. During her absence she had been a victim of the white slave trade in Singapore, rescued by a ship’s captain who had turned out to be the first transsexual Rhodesian, and finally returned to Mooreland. The scene I read for my screen test was the first meeting between Paul and Delilah Grant in five years.

  DELILAH (anguished). Dad, don’t you know me?

  PAUL (hesitating). Not…Delilah?

  DELILAH Yes, I’ve come…home.

  PAUL (embracing her). Oh, Delilah, Delilah. You don’t know how much your mother and I missed…And now your mother is dead. I have remarried. (Slaps his head, looks deeply into her eyes.) But all that can wait. You are going to stay?

  DELILAH (shy, eyes downcast). If you’ll have me. If you’ll forgive me.

  PAUL Darling, forgive you? These years have been hell for us, not knowing. Tell me everything.

  DELILAH Oh, Dad, they’ve been hell for me. I didn’t really mean to run away, you know. I just had to think, to be alone for a few days. (Becomes agitated.) That man, that man—I’ll never forget…

  PAUL (embracing her again, this time roughly). Don’t talk, don’t think. We’ve all the time in the world for that.

  Art Panella, the director, told me I had played the scene with more reserve than he would like. But basically he thought I was fine. Chance, dressed in khaki pants, a peach silk shirt, and a golden chamois leather jacket, leaned against one of the huge cameras. “I beg to differ, Arthur,” he said. “She is perfect. Quiet, shy. Perfect. And she comes to us via Juilliard. She will be a feather in our cap.”

  I beamed proudly. Stuart MacDuff stood beside me until Chance handed me the contracts. Then he kissed my cheek and walked away. My starting salary seemed immense. Chance promised there would be better scripts as soon as they could lure a certain writer away from a competing show. I thought of hiring a lawyer, of showing the contracts to my father, but excitement prevented me. I signed on the spot. I would start two weeks later, leaving me just enough time to withdraw from Juilliard and inform my family.

  That was seven years ago. Now I sat before my dressing-room mirror, made up for the wilds of Lake Huron, and prepared to film my scene with the fur trapper. As far as Delilah was concerned, I perceived no vast difference between a psychotic fur trapper and a white slaver; my character’s character had not changed as much as I had hoped it would. Chance had hired several new scriptwriters who were periodically replaced by other new scriptwriters. The truth, which I hadn’t wanted to face in my wide-eyed days, when I had hoped to revolutionize daytime drama, was that soap operas had to be formulaic. The audience liked them that way. Tears, love, and angst. “Make them laugh, make them cry, and make them wait,” the most famous writer in the business had professed.

  Art was having some trouble getting the lighting exactly the way he wanted it. One of the stagehands told me there would be a fifteen-minute delay. I did what I always did during delays: I called Lily and Margo in Providence.

  Margo answered. As soon as she heard my voice she called for Lily to pick up the extension.

  “Baby, baby, baby, have I got news for you!” Lily said.

  “She’s in love,” Margo said drolly.

  “Oh, you miss Bruno?” I asked.

  “No, he’s gone forever. I’ve faced that. This is someone new—a New Yorker.”

  “Really? Tell all.”

  “He’s a man of medicine,” Margo said. “Our Lily’s going to marry a doctor.”

  “No one said anything about marrying,” Lily said.

  “But you’re seeing quite a bit of him,” Margo said.

  “Tell me! I only have a few minutes,” I said. I could hear Art making happy, satisfied grunts in the studio, and I knew he’d call for me soon.

  “Okay. He’s forty. He’s a heart surgeon at New York Hospital, and he’s giving a seminar here in Providence.”

  “A heart surgeon,” Margo said gravely.

  “Also, he loves art, especially cinquecento! I met him in Professor Bachman’s office—they’re close friends.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Henk Voorhees. He’s Dutch.”

  “You should hear him,” Margo said. “He’s always scoffing at everything. He looks at our white paper towels and says ‘Eh, you should get a color.’”

  “He’s forty?” I asked.

  “Yes, but a very young forty,” Lily said.

  “Married?”

  “No, divorced.”

  “His ex-wife lives in The Hague,” Margo said.

  “Well, it sounds interesting. When did you meet him?”

  “Just last Thursday. He’s in Rhode Island for another week, and then it’s back to New York.”

  “Do you think you’ll visit him sometime? I’d love to meet him.”

  “Definitely.”

  “She took him to Newport, and they had brunch at the Candy Store,” Margo said. We all laughed, thinking of the secrets about Lily known by the Candy Store waiters, of the things Henk could have learned if he’d known whom to ask.

  “So, our Lily’s living dangerously,” I said just before Art rang the bell in my dressing room, indicating that I was wanted in the studio. We said goodbye, and I hung up smiling. Perhaps Lily wouldn’t go to London after all. My secret wish was that all three of us could live in the same city, if not under the same roof.

  Saturday night I went to Susan and Louis’s party in their loft apartment snuggled beneath the Brooklyn Bridge. They shared one floor of an old warehouse with two other couples. All except two were actors, and they were painters. The loft, divided into three separate living areas with a communal kitchen and bathrooms, had windows on only one narrow wall, so most of it was very dark. Susan and Louis combatted this by painting their rooms white, but one of the other couples said that the cavelike aspect had drawn them to the loft in the first place, and had paint
ed their walls black. The noise of rushing bridge traffic was constantly overhead, rattling the old building’s foundations. But the rent was cheap, and that was why Susan and Louis stayed there.

  I wore snug black jeans, battered black boots, and a big blue corduroy shirt. I put more kohl around my eyes than I usually do, and I wore huge, dangling silver earrings. Whenever I go to parties at Susan’s I feel super-aware of my clothes. I make at least three times as much money as anyone else there, so I don’t like to look affluent; also, it is the most artistic crowd I know, and their clothing is as much a means of self-expression as paper, canvas, or the stage. That night I stood in the stairwell, listening to Talking Heads music blare from inside, patting my hips and wondering whether I looked too casual, not funky enough, or too contrived.

  Louis Pease, Susan’s husband, opened the door. He hugged me tight, and I kissed his lips through his soft brown beard. Louis, a composer of avant-garde string music as well as an actor, looks more like a husky cowboy. He wears jeans that flare, flannel shirts, and string ties. He could stand to lose some weight.

  “Hey, Una,” he said. “You’ve arrived.”

  I looked into the room behind him and saw masses of dancers. “Oh, Susan said this was a small party.”

  “You’ve seen our big ones—it’s relative.”

  It was true; I had never been to their place with fewer than seventy-five other people, many of whom Susan and Louis didn’t even know. Word got around about their parties; to people who loved parties, theirs had the right chemistry or something. Susan, Louis, and the loftmates left bowls of fresh popcorn, pretzels, cherries in season, M&M’s, Fritos with hot dip, and chicken wings around the room. You brought your own liquor. You couldn’t even get a ginger ale from the hosts.

  I recognized several Juilliard classmates right away. Susan, lithe in a turquoise turtleneck over black tights that made her legs look as if they went on forever, ducked between dancing guests to greet me. She stood with her back to Louis and squirmed with the music against his body.

  “Glad you’re here,” she said, leaning just far enough away from Louis to kiss me.

  “Una is saying you lured her here on false pretenses,” Louis said.

  “This started out to be a very tiny party—dinner for thirteen people. I was going to make paella. But then I started figuring—hors d’oeuvres, the shellfish, saffron, which costs a veritable fortune per pinch, wine, dessert…I would have spent as much and worked six times as hard as I did for this party.”

  “It’s okay,” I said. I knew that in an hour I would be having a good time, but entering a room filled with people terrified me. Sometimes I wondered whether that fact lay behind my choice to act before cameras instead of a live audience; the reactions of crowds were immediate and brutal. Standing within one, you could see what everyone thought of you by the expressions on their faces. I always acted confident as hell, as if I knew I was wonderful and therefore couldn’t give a shit for what anyone thought of me, but secretly I constantly scanned faces for clues: did they think I was too flashy, too conceited, too reserved, too quiet, too eager? I honestly didn’t know. So I acted as if I didn’t care. Only Susan knew.

  After showing me their stash of Scotch, since I hadn’t been forewarned and therefore couldn’t be expected to have brought my own, Susan and Louis left me to my own devices. Intimate orange light shined from small table lamps. I stood against the old refrigerator, its metal skin yellow and its edges round, and watched the dancers.

  “Hi, Una,” a husky female voice said. It belonged to Jane Valera, a woman I hadn’t seen since Juilliard. “How is your life on television?”

  “Terrific. How’s life on the boards?” I happened to know that Jane hadn’t had a paying part since graduation. Even at school she had had a superiority complex, had called our professors and actors like Al Pacino and Glenda Jackson “colleagues,” had thought that any art without struggle was worthless. She would say “television,” not “soap opera,” because she would not want to admit that she knew what a soap opera was. She had claimed never to watch TV. She had once said she had never heard of Mary Tyler Moore.

  “I’m not acting right now,” she said. “Ted and I have founded a repertory company at our place in Vermont.”

  “Really? You have a company?”

  “A wonderful company. I feel so fortunate. The honor of working with these people…I hardly deserve it. We have Robert Hincks…do you know his work?”

  I nodded. Robert Hincks was a director known for his wild, often violent interpretations of classics like The Three Sisters, The Master Builder, The Tempest. Jane talked on and on, swinging her very long, dark hair in that characteristic, jittery way she had, an affectation meant to suggest that she was a neurotic artist. She spoke in a low, gravelly voice and punctuated her speech with choppy shoulder shrugs and jerks of the head. Her favorite trick was to put herself down, forcing the other person to contradict her.

  “Ted and I have a country house, the Battenkill runs across our property…you can see the mountains all around you. We have an old barn, a massive old barn, which we have made into a theater…we have already started rehearsing The Cherry Orchard. The place is so lovely. So…serene. You absolutely must come to us. It seems to…affect people’s artistic spirits.”

  I knew exactly what someone like Jane must think of the artistic spirit of a soap opera actress. “Thank you for inviting me,” I said.

  “Ted and I feel so fortunate to have such excellent colleagues,” she continued breathily. “We have Trent Lieber, who trained at Yale, Sligo Mallory, who came to us from Trinity in Providence, Hoya Armstrong, who’s worked at the O’Neill workshop six summers in a row—we were so fortunate to get him—and Julius Kramer, from the Guthrie. He did that Pinter in New York last season. Did you see it?”

  “No, I didn’t.” I noticed that everyone Jane had mentioned was male. She had always had a retinue of men at Juilliard; she seemed to draw them with her husky voice, her self-effacing manner. I would say she drew them like “moths to a flame,” but she was so mothlike herself, flitting through the conversation, trying to convince the world she was more spirit than human.

  Susan came to rescue me. “Una, I want you to see Stan’s new painting. ’Scuse us, Jane.” She led me away from the kitchen, into the part of the loft that belonged to Stan and Daria. “Was she telling you about her artists’ colony in Vermont?”

  “Yes, you can see the mountains from the stage.”

  “Louis and I went up last July. She had a big party, where we were all expected to help build the stage. I’m not kidding you! She was really pissed off because we’d forgotten to bring hammers—she didn’t have enough to go around. So her boyfriend taught me how to use an electric saw, and I spent the afternoon sawing wood for the seats. The audience sits on benches. ‘Rough-hewn benches,’ according to the brochure.”

  “Very basic—the performances are so mesmerizing, you’re not supposed to notice your ass is killing you.”

  “Listen. I had to go into her house, to use the telephone or something, and you’ll never believe it. Jane has a Betamax. And an Atari.”

  “I don’t believe it.”

  “I swear it. It’s hooked up to this enormous thirty-six-inch color TV in her bedroom. That’s where the phone was.”

  “Sure it was.” I smiled at Susan’s blush. She hates to admit she likes to snoop.

  “But the best part is—the actors all live in her house. Something very kinky is going on up there. Ted acts as if he doesn’t care, but the air was electric. I mean, Jane was moving in her typical slinky way, and the actors were rubbing against her, trying to get her alone. It was so animalistic. And she was having a very open affair with one of them—Sligo, I think.”

  “I notice Ted’s not with her tonight,” I said. Susan and I were standing in Stan’s studio, which was painted black and smelled like paint thinner. His canvases were huge, covered with nightmare images of howling skeletons. “Jesus, Susie—how can yo
u have this stuff in the house?” It made me feel creepy, as if the skeletons could come alive.

  “They’re about Auschwitz,” Susan said. “He’s been dreaming about it for months now. We wake up and hear him screaming…”

  I shuddered. “I don’t see how you and Louis do it, living with four other people.”

  “It’s what we can afford,” Susan said briskly, and instantly I felt terrible.

  “I know,” I said, trying to smooth my gaffe. “I just mean that it must be difficult. If I have to face anyone before I have three cups of coffee and a look at the Times, forget it…”

  “You’re lucky you can live alone,” she said.

  “Well…”

  “You are.”

  “You’re lucky to be in Hester’s Sister. Is the play in shape yet? How’s it going?”

  “Fine,” she said. She warmed to me again, and her hazel eyes sparked with excitement. “I mean really fine. Keep your fingers crossed, Una. I think it could be a hit.”

  “That’s great,” I said, but why did my heart sink? Susan was my best friend. I wanted her to succeed. This is all because of Jane, I told myself. Jane always made me feel cheap, like a sellout, acting for money while everyone else is acting for passion. But I knew it wasn’t only Jane; for her to make me feel that way, it had to be the truth, didn’t it?

  Susan and I returned to the bosom of the party. She told me to check out the men; she had invited several she thought I might like. I danced a few times. Every so often Louis would find me with a refill for my glass of Scotch. I found myself thinking of Lily and Margo. They understood me. I was always at my best when I was with them, because they knew what to look for. Standing at the edge of the dancers, I found myself thinking of how wonderful it would be if Lily did marry the Dutch heart surgeon and move to New York; we could be one another’s built-in support system.

  I danced a few times with David Hammarslough, a man I had dated at Juilliard. David is tall and dark. He cuts his own hair and always wears the same thing: jeans and a ratty black turtleneck. Sometimes I think he looks like a prisoner, but he has soft black eyes that are kind and knowing. He has appeared in two successful Broadway plays and one Canadian movie. At Juilliard we took dance class together and spent numerous hours staring at each other’s bodies before finally going to bed together, the same night we played opposite each other in Gorky’s Enemies.