You may surmise that I have had something to drink. This might make you think I am being hyperbolic or histrionic or that word that makes all women of my age cringe, hysterical. As if my hormones or my uterus (the Greek word for womb is hustera, etc.) were the engine of my writerly ablutions. That’s not it. Mostly I am writing because I know and see things no one else does. Because I have to. It is my job, my assignment. I am on the verge of elation. Liberated. Part of me feels relief, I cannot deny it.
I will elaborate, I promise.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” Denise said, barely audible in the empty room. Is this really what she was left with? Another overly elaborated joke?
How peculiar this feels: before tonight I never imagined I would try to write about anything, much less this. I don’t mean I don’t understand why people write. Written words demand the deep attention that spoken words just aren’t entitled to. Writers get to pull something solid out of our relentless, everyday production of verbal mucilage. A writer is a word salvager and scavenger and distiller.
As you know, I have occasionally fixated on words—I love to talk and sometimes words come out with embarrassing urgency. I can feel them as almost physical things as I push breath into them. This, I am afraid, is a consequence of solitude. Spoken words become extravagant and magical, and I admit that I have, on more than one occasion, caught myself speaking my thoughts aloud, as though vocalizing them gave them an extra reality, but I don’t think I ever felt any urgent expressive needs about actually writing words down. No desire to extrude something that would endure beyond my mere mortal squeak. Except now, when writing them down seems not to be about cheating the given human terms but instead simply a way to relieve my isolation. “The artistic impulse,” wrote Colette, “even more than the sexual impulse, breaches the barriers.” So be it—smash these walls down. Raze them to the cellar.
Denise stopped reading and took a long breath. And then another. She swayed and steadied herself against her brother’s desk. She realized she had been holding her breath as she read. And standing. She pulled out his desk chair with her elbow. She did not put the letter down. She held it in her hand, her index finger and middle finger keeping the last page distinct from the first. She sat on his chair and leaned toward his desk. Her damp hair stuck to the back of her neck. She should take a sip of water, something. Denise read on to see what Nik had “Denise” say next.
The simplest answer and probably the most accurate answer is that Nik’s art was his life. And I don’t know what that means about a life. I have always resisted artistic impulses of any kind. I always believed that if you weren’t good, what right did you have to do it? This question dates back to when I did try, for a time, to be an actress. A deliverer and even exalter, I imagined, of all those delightfully rescued and worked words, phrases, and sentences. At seventeen I even enrolled in a very exclusive acting workshop. You didn’t know this, did you? But I must confess my initial appearance there, like many things in my life, was accidental. The class met at an equity-waiver theater on Melrose Avenue every Wednesday night. He was a famous teacher; he coached serious movie actors. He would be hired to be on set during important scenes. He held secrets, we were led to believe. And despite how cliché this may sound, I was not even intending to audition for his class. I was there with a friend who wanted to audition. My friend Avril (who burned to be an actor from the moment she saw Judith Anderson’s repulsive-yet-compelling performance in Hitchcock’s brilliant domestic torture film Rebecca), wanted to go and I came along to help her. We did a scene from Done by Hand. I played Janice. I knew nothing about acting. I had no desire to act. But, in the same way a broken clock is right twice a day (I apologize for another cliché), anyone can act for one scene if the one scene happens to require the exact comportment with which you are naturally inclined to when on stage. So in this specific role, in this specific scene, my fontal rush of propulsive fear, my prickly self-strickenness, and my strangled underlaugh that was (and still is) a result of what Sigmund Freud identified as the “liminal dilemma between the intense desire for supplication and the concurrent need for masochistic provocation” all combined to create an illusion of a brilliant stage presence, bursting with potential and future possibility. All of which I didn’t have—not as an actor, certainly.
So I was astonishing, a dazzling creature of tangled, alluring complexity. For five minutes, at seventeen, in the Barbara Stanwyck Theater on a Wednesday.
I said my last line, blurted it in a manic breath. I heard the famous teacher say, “Stop there.” I felt dampness leaking under my arms; I was glistening with what I would have guessed is called “flop sweat”; I could even feel a trickle down the side of my neck. I opened my eyes (they must have been closed for the entire last line). Avril stared at me, her lips quivering. Her face was red and she was clearly on the verge of tears. Was I that bad? I could feel the whole room on the edge of a deep intake of breath, and then into the breach came an avalanche of intense applause. What a thing, Ada. The rough din of all that sudden hand-smacking: you actually can feel it as well as hear it. It is an assault; it is as if they are trying to break in to you somehow. They are laying a claim to whatever it is you just created. I nearly fainted.
The teacher appeared out of the dark and mounted the stage. He waved his hand at the audience and the applause abruptly stopped. His face betrayed no apparent pleasure or displeasure: it was a studious, controlled expression. (One should expect nothing less from an acting teacher than control of the face.) Then I realized his intent, his concentration, was fixed. And it was not fixed on Avril; it was fixed on me. I was along to merely assist, but I was asked to join the workshop on the spot and Avril was not.
Looking back, I must concede there was a little more to it than my coincidental impersonation of a gifted actor. The more to it that I am alluding to is the way I looked. This is a sketchy thing to discuss, but I was frankly pretty in a very actressy way. I had that extra-pretty shine that seems to fix to actors, a shimmery charisma that you can’t miss even if the actor has unwashed hair and no makeup on. I saw Cary Grant, once, at the Beverly Center on a Saturday afternoon. He was silver-haired, way past his heyday. Yet he was that extra-shiny thing, a gorgeous old man, not at all like anyone else there. What is more, he seemed to suck up all the attention in the place, he was like a black hole, drawing curiosity and desire like matter toward infinity. And it had nothing to do with fame, at least not for me, because I didn’t even recognize him. I noticed him before I saw everyone whispering and I discovered who he was. A young woman pushed the shopping cart as he strolled alongside; he appeared conspicuously unaware of the gaze of others as he attended a cantaloupe with an outstretch of his cashmere-covered arm. His power came from his electric prettiness, his extra glow. If we were all in a painting, he would have one of those intricate halos around him, gilt-traced, radiant. That’s exactly what it was, a radiance that felt holy. At least as holy as one could feel shopping at the Beverly Center on a Saturday afternoon. I nearly stopped and applauded as he walked by. We all nearly did.
My extra-prettiness was a minor version of that. I had the regular, symmetrical features of a pretty girl. I had the slim yet plush figure of the standard object of desire. And on top of that I had this little sparkly extra thing, the thing that makes people think you ought to be an actor, the thing that makes everyone sneak disbelieving glances at every detail of you. (Does the exquisite hollow of her philtrum meet her lip at exactly the most alluring depth? Yes, it does. Do her tiny pale earlobes hang only halfway before attaching in the most elegant and demure way? Oh yes. And so on.) I still have some remnant of that kind of beauty, but even I know that it really peaked for me at around seventeen. Some women grow into their peak beauty: they are deep, powerful creatures. Some women seem to miss it entirely, the sum of their pieces becoming somehow less than is really fair. My mother was in the latter category. Her attractiveness had always felt unrealized. She was fifteen pounds away, or she needed a new haircut, or clothes that fit her better. But that was an illusion. She just didn’t add up in quite the right way, and no matter what she did, there would always be something just out of reach for her. She was a woman who always