Page 76 of Playworld

The script arrived later that evening. One of the gofers brought it over along with my call sheet. My shoot lasted just over two weeks and began on Monday. Sprinkled throughout were several days when I’d be free to attend school. The script had a blue cover, its pages held fast with gold binder clips. In embossed letters were the movie’s title,Take Two,and below that,Written by Alan Hornbeam.

“I’m gonna take a bath,” I said. I deposited the script on my bed, then went to the bathroom and locked the door. I undressed, lit two of Mom’s candles, and turned off the overhead light. I made the water as hot as I could handle. I gingerly sank into the tub while it filled and let my body acclimate. It was the first time I ever recalled being grateful for acting. Oren was right. It was my all-access pass across police lines. It was my secret password through those blue doors. It had introduced me to Amanda. In the tub, I pinched my nose and then slowly submerged my head. I did this a few times, trying to recall the entire experience of meeting Amanda. Her delight when I took the stage, which was partly surprise, I was certain, that I’d found my way to her audience. How I could feel my pulse’s small fillips when she took my wrist in her hand. And that moment, perhaps above all, on Broadway, just before her northbound bus appeared, when the place on my palm where she’d written on it was still wet and to be gently clasped, as if I held a guppy. These images bobbed before me and then disappeared, like the Hudson’s wavelets. I bobbed along with them. I blew a long stream of bubbles until I’d emptied my lungs; I believed that if I drowned now, I’d die happy. I’d absorbed most of the water’s heat, so I got out of the tub and turned on the light. In the mirror’s reflection I saw my skin was bright pink.

Mom had written my call schedule on the inside cover of the script and marked each of my scenes with their corresponding shoot date on Post-it notes. I filmed two this upcoming Monday, both with Hornbeam. Only in the first did I have any lines (“She’s my math tutor” and “I don’t know. Fifteen? Why?”). There, memorized. I lay on my bunk with my fingers laced behind my head. The only sound in our room was thehiss from Oren’s headphones and the distant murmur of the television coming from my parents’ room. At some point Oren turned off the light and said, “Good night.” At some point I climbed down from my bed to look at him. He lay facing the wall and I said his name.

“What?” he replied.

“I met a girl,” I said.

“When?” he asked.

“Today,” I answered.

He asked, “Can I retake the test tomorrow?”

I sighed and then wandered into my parents’ room. In the television’s blue light, which was lambent and flickered, I stared at them sleeping. Dad, facing me, had a fist bunched at his temple; Mom, lying on her back, had her forearm draped over her eyes. They both slept with their mouths open. They reminded me of the plaster casts of the victims of Pompeii, held fast in the moment just as they’d cried out. I turned the TV’s knob, and the screen dissolved from Johnny Carson wearing his Carnac the Magnificent costume into a single dot.

I put on my sneakers and left the apartment. At the elevator bank I pressedUp. While I waited, the three shafts howled with the drafts. The car arrived. I stepped on and pressed thirty. The smell of curry, as I rose past eight, coming from the Sinais’ apartment. Arrived, I entered the stairwell and walked up the single flight. At its landing the steel door had a metal stile that readPush to Exit—Alarm Will Sound, but the door was already ajar. I shouldered it open and walked onto the roof’s great yawning space. Against the black sky, the nightscape glowed all around me; like a crossword, the buildings’ faces were gridded with diagonals of lights and shaded squares. The Empire State Building’s antenna shined white in the distance. High-altitude gusts, frosty as an opened freezer, mingled with the warmer updrafts. The roof offered a compass-rose view of the city: south toward the harbor, east toward Lincoln Center, north toward the George Washington Bridge, and, from its Jersey-facing side, where I took a seat on the ledge, the Hudson, black as tar. The occasional car horn rose up to sound near my ear. There’d been an accident on the West Side Highway; the north- and southbound lanes slowed. The traffic’s red-and-white counterflow lengthened and contracted like an earthworm. Was it safe to say that on the entire islandof Manhattan I was the only person seated this high outside? What I was certain of was that for the first time in my life, I wanted to get to know someone. Just the fact that I knew nothing about Amanda seemed a terrible deficit—one that I had to remedy as soon as possible. That I might address this lack organized my horizon, oriented me in every direction, like this view, and comforted me. Because I could now name this feeling I’d been suffering, one that had dogged me of late, during our vacation and afterward, but that I recognized from all the way back to the fire. It had been so omnipresent it was more like an atmosphere—one that, having been made aware of it, I could neither unsee nor unfeel, and its name was loneliness.

Dungeons & Dragons

The following Monday morning, Dad escorted me to the shoot. I could tell how happy he was about my role because he flagged a cab instead of us walking up to Amsterdam to catch the northbound bus.

Dad said almost nothing while we rode. When he did break the silence, he spoke only to the driver: “Take Eighty-Sixth across, please.” When I asked him if we could go by our old apartment, even though it would be farther uptown and cost more, he said, “Actually, driver, take Ninety-Sixth.” My desire was only partly nostalgic. While we waited for the light to change on Broadway, I scanned all four corners of the intersection for Amanda. I had an overwhelming urge to tell my father about meeting her but wasn’t sure how to begin. Mostly I wanted his advice about how many days I should wait to call her. Dad had rolled down his window. His curly hair was damp and drying in the breeze.

“Are you rehearsing today?” I asked, because he was particularly well dressed.

He nodded. “There’s a run-through this Friday at the St. James,” he said. “I’m hoping you’ll all come see.”

With so little traffic, we raced down the street at highway speed. We passed Boyd Prep on our right, and I smiled at the thought of missing school, at this jailbreak freedom, and Dad, noticing where we were aswell, turned to me and mirrored my expression, and it felt like it wasourcity, the one its nine-to-fivers rarely got to see, the one we, not caged by such hours, sped through, unimpeded, and enjoyed. I thought about Oren’s advice, and it occurred to me that, were I to become famous, I’d never have to go to school again. Was that something I wanted? The park’s smells as we entered the transverse were pungent and fresh. The birdsong was still audible when we stopped at the Fifth Avenue light.

“I met this girl,” I said. “She gave me her number.”

But Dad had become preoccupied. We were headed down Fifth, and the moment we turned east onto Ninety-Second Street, he said to the cabbie, “It’s the movie set up there on the left.” And I forgave him this bit of showing off because I was desperate for his answer.

“But I didn’t want to call right away,” I said.

“Wait two or three days,” he said as he paid, hurriedly, and checked his watch. “That way you don’t seem overanxious.”

The gofer greeted us at the police barrier. When Dad tried to enter with me, he said, “I’m sorry, Mr. Hornbeam doesn’t allow guests on set.”

Dad’s eye twitched. “But I’m his father.”

“It’s a strict policy.”

Dad glanced at me, as if for help, then said to the gofer, “I’m an actor as well.”

“You could be President Reagan and it wouldn’t make a difference.”

Dad blinked several times. I could tell he was disappointed. He’d skipped the Y this morning and shaved at home. He was wearing a nice shirt, slacks, and his tan Paul Stuart coat. And it dawned on me that he’d dressed for Hornbeam, he’d assumed he was going to meet him, and that the introduction might be consequential. That he’d considered this an audition of sorts.

“All right, son,” he said, perhaps a bit loudly, maybe a smidge pissed, “have a good day at work.” He pulled me toward him by the shoulder, kissed my forehead, and watched me leave. But when from the top of the town house’s steps I turned to wave goodbye, he was talking to a pretty lady carrying a toy poodle. She pointed at me and he nodded—“My son,” he said—then scratched the dog’s ears.

After makeup, I positioned myself before the same living room window to watch the Nightingale entrance for a sign of Amanda. I eyed thegirls strolling up the block, most with friends and a few of the younger ones holding their parents’ hands as they were dropped off at school, but did not see her. Soon the street was empty of students, the blue doors had closed, and, disappointed, I settled in to work. Which meant a lot of waiting for setup, and for Diane Lane, who played my math tutor, to get done with makeup as well. Jill Clayburgh and I chatted. She too had just come out of makeup and stood with the odd stiffness of being fully in costume. She told me she admired how relaxed I seemed, given how challenging it was to arrive on set like this, midstream, as it were, no table reads to go by, no preproduction direction from Hornbeam, and that I should feel free to ask her any questions.

Diane Lane, who’d just joined us, said the same. When Clayburgh asked me what I thought of our characters’ relationship, I, entirely unprepared to answer—I still hadn’t bothered to finish the script—told her I was going to ask her the very same thing. She said she thought I was understandably protective of my mother, a dynamic reinforced by the fact that I was more like a father to my father, since he was as impulsive as a child and his absence in my life had made me the man of the house. Which, when you thought about it, Clayburgh continued, also made me the surrogate husband to my mother. “In short,” she said, and bumped her elbow to mine, “you’re a psychoanalyst’s dream.”

The living room where we were shooting had been transformed, swapped out with new furniture. When I asked Lane why everything was different, she said, “Last week they finished all the scenes that take place on Konig’s movie set. Now we’re shooting the ones that take place in his actual town house. They even swapped out the chandelier.” She winked. “Don’t worry, I won’t tell Mr. Hornbeam you haven’t done your homework.” Then she put a finer point on it. “Not that I’ll have to.”

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