Page 6 of Playworld

In person, Neal was soft-spoken, almost demure. He had large, expressive eyes, and a mustache and beard that seemed more apparatus than facial hair, as if integral to the workings of his jaw. Once or twice a week, Mom had the couple over for martinis, Al excusing himself after the second to retrieve a bottle of wine from their apartment, leaving my mother and Neal alone for a few minutes. He always seemed so indrawn sitting there, his hands clasped on his lap or tucked beneath his bulging biceps. He was one of the rare people able to coax my mother out, to get her talking, to make her laugh, and in Al’s absence, them getting along almost felt like a betrayal. But I favored Neal. Al was never reluctant to correct or reprimand Oren or me in our parents’ presence, and he often failed to keep our names straight when he told us to shut up or to maybe go play outside. But Neal always greeted us with interest, actually looking at the drawings we showed him or the papier-mâché sculptures we made at school. If my mother had to step out to the store for wine or couldn’t get a sitter when she was seeing the ballet’s Sunday matinee, she occasionally left us with him, walking us down the hall, Oren and me admiring her pretty dress as she rang his apartment’s bell and then caught the elevator as soon as he answered.

Neal was a dealer in Eastern art. He owned a gallery in midtown, but he also did a great deal of business from home. Their apartment was a menagerie of paintings, silk screens, and religious sculpture that even now I’m tempted to see primarily as a reflection of their relationship: hydra-headed Naga, the snake goddess, emerging from a dragon’s mouth like a stream of Al’s profanity; fanged Kali, trident and scimitar in hand, and poor Al, I imagined, pinned like Shiva beneath Neal’s foot; boar-toothed Raijin, the Japanese thunder god, whose puck-sized drums orbited him as he squared off against Fujin, shouldering his bag of winds.

“Are they enemies?” I asked Neal as we regarded the two-paneled screen.

“Companions,” Neal said. He shrugged sheepishly and added, “They make a lot of noise.” He laughed, so I did too. To pass our time together, Neal liked to read me stories from the New English Bible. In Genesis we reread the stories about Jacob and Esau. Neal was especially fond of Exodus, while I preferred Judges—those Old Testament superheroes—but most often we returned to the adventures of David and his tussles with Saul, whose spear-throwing at his adopted son I found strangely upsetting.

“Do you trust your parents?” Neal once asked me after concluding a chapter. I was playing myself in chess—Neal had taught me the game—on an antique Indian set and moved my camel diagonally across the board to take the opposing elephant, at which point Neal apologized, adding, “Please don’t tell them I asked.”

Their corner apartment was the floor’s only three-bedroom. Our parents were in the market for more space, and upon first getting a tour my father had remarked to Neal, with his typical unwitting bluntness, “If you ever decide to move, let us know.”

But our family moved first.

That winter, my father had been touring withThe Fisher King,the first of two Abe Fountain musicals in which he’d perform. Sunday was the only evening of the week he was home. After the matinee, he’d take a train from Philadelphia or D.C., then depart again the following evening. “The house is dark on Monday,” he’d explain, which always felt to me like a strange thing to say as he unpacked his bag. That night—I remember the Christmas lights were strung around our window—my parents were in their bedroom when Oren and I snuck out of ours. On the living room’s coffee table, beside a pair of empty wineglasses, were several lit candles my mother had left burning. I took the holder by its knob and, careful not to let the melted wax bleed over, led Oren into our front hall closet. “It’s a cave,” I told him upon entering, pushing away the jacket sleeves above us. “Watch out for the stalactites.” I recall him crawling past me, while I slid the door closed. When I turned and raised the candle to illuminate the darkness between us, itwhuffeda sheath of dry-cleaning plastic, instantly igniting the coat within it, the jacket wondrously visible amid the flames. I dropped the candle holder and,in a panic, scooted backward, Oren doing the same but deeper into the closet.

From this point forward, my recollections grow fragmented. There is first blackness, and then I hear our cat meowing, its pitch high and desperate, a mournful sound that mimicked her name, which was French for “kitty”:Minou,she seemed to cry,Minou, Minou.The next thing I recall is Oren and I hiding behind my bed. “It’s a fire,” I said to him, “a real fire.” Then the pair of us racing to my parents’ bedroom to alert them to the blaze. Next I see my mother near the foyer, separated from me by a wall of flames. “Shel,” she screams to my father, “get the bucket!” I was sure she meant the plastic pail that I took to the beach, orange with a white handle and my name written on it in black marker, but why did she say “the bucket” instead of “the boys”? And then I was borne aloft, my father yanking my wrist above my head and carrying me in such a fashion that I occasionally touched down. My foot stamped a patch of flame on the entryway rug but didn’t burn. The lobby was filled with the evacuated tenants, all of us watching the firemen unhurriedly file in and march up the stairs. Smoke crawled along the ceiling’s recessed lights. I was in my father’s arms. He was wearing his bathrobe, the one with brown and black stripes, his only article of clothing to survive the blaze. All I could think while I held his neck was:Me, I did this.

We lost a great deal of property: clothing, furniture, jewelry. The work of several artist friends that my father never failed to remind me “might’ve become valuable one day.” The Stickley dining room set Lauren Bacall had gifted Dad for voice-coaching her inApplause.Minou, who had hidden so well my mother couldn’t find her, died from smoke inhalation—the death I caused. While my mother scrambled to secure us a new apartment, Al and Neal were kind enough to let our family move into their place. I’d have my first Saturday session with Elliott a few weeks later. For nearly a decade, and in spite of therapy, this wasmyversion of the event. It was not that the fire was verboten in our family; more accurately, and like so many subjects in that era—think religion—it was an issue left to me to raise. As for Oren’s version, there was one critical difference in our accounts, a piece of missing information he’d ultimately supply that for years he protected like a state secret.

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My parents had a ten-thousand-dollar insurance policy and filed a claim. Enter the agent handling it: Nick Salvatore. In the ensuing years, after my father and mother had retold the story so many times I made it my own, the on-the-nose irony of the agent’s name would never be lost on me. My parents met him in the lobby for the inspection, this young man memorable for many reasons but to my mother because of his heart-stopping good looks. Salvatore was a classically beautiful Italian man, from his curly, squid-ink hair to the amber-buttered hue of his skin, which made his teeth appear whiter when he smiled. He wore a camel hair coat over his black suit, a pressed white shirt with a dark tie—funereal colors, my mother thought, entirely appropriate given what had befallen them. But the beacon-bright accents of his shirt and overcoat, even his name, suggested he was more like an angel—he was here to help, after all. What made her swoon, however, were his hands, in both of which he cradled hers when she greeted him. Something about their size and squareness, the hard angles of his thumbs’ metacarpals and the pronounced, indented triangles where they joined his wrists, made her desire take flight and then bloom inside her chest like fireworks. She was a deeply loyal person, incapable of infidelity, and yet it took all of her self-control not to turn to my father and say, “Why don’t you go find something else to do?”

Salvatore couldn’t have been older than twenty-five, and while my parents rode the elevator with him to their devastated apartment, she was transported back to Rome, to her honeymoon, the afternoons she had to herself after the movie star Anthony Quinn, who had brought them along to Europe so my father could continue as his voice coach, had decamped with Shel to play tennis—a daily ritual that always ended with the pair eating lunch so late it pushed back dinner until nearly midnight. Come midday, when boredom and exhaustion had overwhelmed her, she fled their stuffy hotel room, abandoning her typewriter and Quinn’s rambling recorded dictation (she was transcribing his autobiography), to find somewhere to eat first and then window-shop a little, killing the rest of the afternoon at a café with a book and a carafe of wine. This was followed by an early-evening siesta that left her bright-eyed for the endless dinners, which she was bathed and dressed for long before Shel andQuinn returned. During these several-hour jaunts through Trastevere or Prati, the Foro Romano or Via del Corso, she was often accosted by such similarly gorgeous men walking Rome’s streets singly or in packs, their English poor but for the most obvious blandishments—“pretty lady” or “my beauty.” It was at these moments that she suffered neither temptation to stray nor regret at her newly betrothed state but something far sharper and more crushing because it was an emotion entirely new to her: she felt alone in her marriage.

Standing beside my mother in the lobby, my father also had a strong reaction to Mr. Salvatore’s appearance. Why, he thought, were such good looks squandered on an insurance salesman? Why couldn’thehave been similarly proportional, more symmetrical, instead of his own enormous face, from chin to crown as long as a canoe, with a brow so tall one asshole casting agent once said, “You remind me of a Jewish Herman Munster.”

To my mother, Salvatore said, “Mrs. Hurt, I’m sorry for your loss, but I promise: Nationwide is on your side. We’re gonna take care of your family.”

My father had noticed my mother’s reaction to Salvatore, her already severe shyness so intensified by his presence that she was rendered speechless. Her attraction to him was so obvious, an obviousness so closely akin to a poor performance, that my father couldn’t bear to watch. Lily grew talkative the moment they got on the elevator. By the time they arrived at the apartment door, she’d not only recounted to Salvatore the whole disaster but also confessed to a lingering sense of guilt for leaving the candles burning.

“I don’t know how I could’ve been so thoughtless,” she said.

Salvatore pressed his hand to her shoulder. He rubbed it somewhat hurriedly, like he might a homely aunt’s, but so far as Shel was concerned he kept it there a little too long.

“Aw, c’mon, Mrs. Hurt,” he said, “you’re being too hard on yourself.”

“What if one of the children had been injured?” she said. “Or worse, like our poor cat?”

Lily was crying now, and Shel was relieved. When calm, confident, her ballerina’s beauty was angular and regal, as long-necked as she was; upset, however, her features collapsed like a shrunken apple.

“Thankfully neither of them was,” he noted.

“I rushed the kids to bed,” she continued. “I left dishes in the sink and thosestupidcandles on the table. Shel had been gone all week, and I wanted us to have some time alone.”

What was she going to tell him next? my father wondered. That while they were making love and heard the kids scurrying around, he’d told her to ignore them, that sooner or later they’d go to sleep?

“Let the man do his job,” my father said.

Her expression grim, my mother nodded toward the door. “I don’t think I can bring myself to go in there.”

“There’s no need whatsoever,” Salvatore said.

Gathering herself, she offered her hand to him once more. “Thank you again, Mr. Salvatore.”

“Please,” he said. “Call me Nick.”

Lily smiled, then snapped open her purse and found some tissues, dabbing her eyes with them. She laughed, and the transformation back to her old self was miraculous: her face reconfiguring, her cheeks blooming with color. Salvatore smiled back.

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