Page 1 of Playworld

Prologue

In the fall of 1980, when I was fourteen, a friend of my parents named Naomi Shah fell in love with me. She was thirty-six, a mother of two, and married to a wealthy man. Like so many things that happened to me that year, it didn’t seem strange at the time.

Two decades later, when I finally told my mother—we were on Long Island, taking a walk on the beach—she stopped, stunned, and said, “But she was such an ugly woman.” The remark wasn’t as petty as it sounds. If I was aware of it then, it neither repulsed me nor affected my feelings for Naomi. It was just a thing I took for granted, like the color of her hair.

Wiry and ashen, it had the shading but not the shimmer of pigeon feathers. Naomi kept it long, so that it fell past her shoulders. I knew it by touch, for my face was often buried in it. Only later did I wonder if she considered herself unattractive, because she always wore sunglasses, as if to hide her face, large gold frames with blue-tinted prescription lenses. When we were driving together, which was often that year, she’d allow these to slide down her nose and then look at me over their bridge. She might’ve considered this pose winning, but it was more likely to see me better. Her mouth often hung slightly open. Her lower teeth were uneven, and her tongue, which pressed against them, always tasted of coffee.

Naomi’s car was a silver Mercedes sedan—300SDalong withTurbo Dieselnickel-plated on the back—that made a deep hum when she drove. The interior, enormous in my mind’s eye, was tricked out with glossy wood paneling and white leather, back seat so wide and legroom so ample they made the driver appear to be far away. It was in this car that Naomi and I talked most often. We’d park, and then she’d lean across the armrest to press her cheek to mine, and I’d sometimes allow her to kiss me. Other times we’d move to the back. Lying there with Naomi, her nose nuzzled to my neck, I’d stare at the ceiling’s dotted fabric until the pattern seemed to detach and drift like a starred sky. This car was her prized possession, and like many commuters, she had turned the machine into an extension of her body. Her left thumb lightly hooked the wheel at eight o’clock when traffic was moving, her fingertips sliding to eleven when it was slow. She preferred to sit slightly reclined, her free hand spread on her inner thigh, though after she lost her pinkie the following summer, and even after being fitted with a prosthesis, she kept it tucked away.

“I was worried you’d think it was disgusting,” she said, the digit hidden between the seat and her hip. She’d bought herself a diamond ring to hide the seam, and for the most part the likeness was uncanny, but at certain angles you could tell—the cuticle’s line was too smooth, the nail’s pale crescent too creamy to match the others. Like my father’s fake teeth, which he occasionally left lying around our apartment, I was fascinated by it, though my curiosity wasn’t morbid. I was a child actor, you see, a student of all forms of dissembling, and had long ago found my greatest subject to be adults.

Part One

The

Carter

Administration

Politics is just like show business.

You have a hell of an opening, coast for a while, and then have a hell of a close.

—Ronald Reagan

A Crisis of Confidence

We were at the fortieth wedding anniversary celebration of Dr. Barr and his wife, Lynn. The Barrs lived in Great Neck. We’d driven from Manhattan just before the sun was beginning to set. As we crossed the Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge, Roosevelt Island’s towers flashed, the shadows of Manhattan’s buildings just starting to climb their faces. By the time we arrived the sky was a buffed pink, with plenty of light for my younger brother, Oren, to name the make and model of every car parked in the driveway, ending with Dr. Barr’s Cadillac Seville. It was a vehicle whose cachet we associated with the bold gilt letters on the door of his Gramercy Park office, but the high esteem in which we held him did not change the fact that in our house, and on nights like these, he was known only by his first name: Elliott.

He was my father’s best friend and our family’s psychologist. All of us consulted with him: Mom midweek, Dad and Oren and me on Saturday mornings. My father had been Elliott’s patient since before he met my mother; she, the year after they married. Oren had only recently started therapy because his grades were sliding, but I’d been seeing Elliott since I was six, after a family death I’d caused. It never struck me as odd, the thinness of the membrane between patient and friend, between husband and wife, brother and brother, perhaps because Elliott had been sucha ubiquitous presence for as long as I could remember. If anything, it made Elliott seem even wiser, able, as I imagined he was, to keep so many secrets from four people without judging them.

The Barrs’ home was so packed with guests it made me feel like we were standing in a closet, the men’s blazers and the women’s wraps and scarves muffling the music as we moved through zones of perfume, Scotch, and cigarette smoke. Oren and I made repeat trips to the buffet (the salmon soon only a head and a tail), watched some of ABC’sWide World of Sportsin the guest room (Elliott had one of the biggest TVs I’d ever seen, but the reception was terrible), and then checked out Elliott’s collection of masks mounted in the dining room’s display case, whose glass Oren tried to open: arrow-headed shamans, saber-toothed Kabuki demons, and our favorites from the Chinese opera, their designs like superhero masks and as colorful as pinball machines. But having exhausted ways of relieving our boredom, we split up.

This was when Naomi and I ended up alone together for the first time. She was sitting on the living room sofa. I sat on the coffee table, facing her. I was telling her about my acting career. She had asked me about playing Roy Scheider’s son inThe Talon Effect.

“What was it like working with him?” she said.

“He was nice,” I said. “Roy and I ate lunch together my first day on the set, and when I opened my soda it sprayed his face, so he angled his can’s mouth toward mine, popped the tab, and got me back.”

“And Joan Collins,” she said. “Is she as pretty in person?”

“Sheis,” I said, “though one day during makeup the hairdresser stuck a teasing comb behind her ear and lifted a wig clean off her head.”

Naomi found this hysterical. She snorted when she laughed, pressing her fingernails to her chest. Between her rings and bracelets and her gold earrings shaped like cymbals, she clinked whenever she moved. She was a Great Neck Jewess. She had the classic up-Island accent, one I could mimic on command: “Avawhdvilleact, this kid is,” I said, imitating her, “a regularprawdigy.” She was wide-hipped; she wore sheer stockings beneath a wool skirt. Her blouse was a tailored silk, open at the neck, which revealed, when she leaned forward, a peek of collarbone and the lacy spray of her bra. On her cheek was a light brown birthmark, the texture and color of a burned egg white.

It was the heat of Naomi’s attention that got me so excited, plus the odd way we sat hidden in plain sight—how the party, by now well into its swing, domed us in a kind of privacy—because it was at this point that I did something remarkable and fateful: I got into character. She’d asked me about the Saturday morning TV series I’d been doing for several seasons, “the one,” she said, “that adults watch too.” She snapped her fingers, trying to conjure the title as if from the narrow space between us, and then laid her hand on my shoulder.“The Nuclear Family,”she said, remembering, and then leaned back to clap once. It was more spoof than superhero show, vaguely educational, each episode organized around a different scientific concept. An exposure to radiation had altered the DNA of my character, Peter Proton, along with that of his parents, Ellen Electron and Nate Neutron. Before we fought bad guys, we’d summon our powers by yelling, “Split up!” After Three Mile Island had nearly melted down, everyone called the show prophetic. Naomi wanted to know how we did the special effects—the atomic eye blasts and flying sequences. I was explaining chroma-keying to her, how we’d hang from wires in front of a green screen, when I suddenly stopped. My expression changed. I turned away and, through my nose, forced all the breath from my chest. It was a trick I’d learned in order to make myself tear up.

“Sweetie,” she asked, “are you all right?”

“I’m going to tell you a secret,” I said. “But you have to swear not to tell anyone.” I had a tear perfectly balanced—it was like palming a beach ball in the wind—and when I faced Naomi again, I let it fall down my cheek. “Will you swear?” I asked.

Naomi looked over her shoulder and then leaned forward and whispered, “Of course, honey.”

I told her that I’d lost my virginity to Liz, the director’s assistant. She was twenty-four. On set, she was everything from gofer to script girl, and because I was extra busy once school started—what with the tighter shooting schedule, I explained, and my homework on top of that—I’d struggled to memorize my lines. She and I often rehearsed together, and for several weeks straight we’d found ourselves alone in my dressing room. One night while going over a scene, it just happened. We’d been secretly dating ever since.

“She’s worried she’ll get in trouble,” I said.

“Because of your age, you mean?”

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