Page 80 of Playworld

“To work on appearing relaxed.”

“Can we start?”

“Suit yourself,” he said.

We ran through the scene once. A few lines through the second, Dad said, “Maybe a little more oomph on that one. With a dramatic pause first.”

“Where?”

“ ‘The girl I like,’ ” he said, “ ‘she…she doesn’t know Iexist.’ ”

“There’s no ‘she’ in the line,” I said. “It’s: ‘The girl I like doesn’t know I exist.’ ”

“Ad-lib it,” Dad said. “For effect.”

“Hornbeam hates that.”

“You’ll never know till you try.”

“Jill Clayburgh tried today. Hornbeam told her to read the line as written. And I’m no Jill Clayburgh.”

“Fair enough,” Dad said, but he was crestfallen.

We proceeded.

“The girl I like doesn’t know I exist,” I said.

Dad held out his hand, which he bunched into a fist.“Exist,”he intoned.

“You sound like a depressed giant,” I said.

“Fine,” he said, and threw down the script. He stood. “What couldIpossibly know”—he gestured toward our third-story view of Manhattan—“aboutacting?” Upon which he thumped out of the room.

Dad was still grumpy when we sat down to eat. I was explaining Freytag’s Pyramid to Oren when Dad asked, offhandedly, “How does the movie end, by the way?”

Mom snapped, “I thought you said you read it.” She was pissed off at him for reasons unknown, but which had transpired sometime between our rehearsal and dinner.

“I read enough to get the gist,” Dad said to her.

“Maybe if you finished,” Mom said, “you could talk to your son about character motivation. Like satyriasis.”

“What’s that?” I said.

Mom glared at Dad as he hunched over his plate, biting the last bits of pork from the rib.

“Iread it,” Oren said. “I thought it was talky. Like our family, but on amphetamines.”

“Since when do you know anything about amphetamines?” Mom said.

“Okay, then,” Oren said, “cocaine.”

“Ithought it was brilliant,” Mom said to him. “Ithink it’s a dead-on description of the price an artist pays for hisnarcissism.Look upthatword,” she went on, turning to me, “if you don’t know what it means. And I also thought”—here she glared at Dad—“the tragedy of Konig’s character is that he needs certain things from certain people at certain times. And when his needs change, he discards them like old toys. As foryouropinion,” she said to Oren, “keep your half-baked ideas to yourself.”

There was suddenly a terriblecrack.

“Fuck,” Dad said, and cupped his mouth.“Fuck!”

He hurried to the bathroom. Mom slowly shook her head as she watched him go.

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