Good Riddance(79)

40


Pie in the Sky?



All was good—so good that we were soon referring to my apartment as the guest room/Airbnb/storage facility across the hall.

After much beseeching, Jeremy gave me a sneak preview of the as-yet-untitled draft. Very wisely, he’d repurposed Geneva as a man, moved her/him from Manhattan to Pickering, where he drove around town on garbage day, salvaging things like used furniture and tin cans, except one lucky day—or so he thought—when he came upon a dog-eared, overly notated high school yearbook.

And that so-called Eugene Palumbo had a son who was graduating from Emerson College and needed a topic for his senior thesis in documentary filmmaking. Could anyone guess the real-life identity of the villain from this setup? Surely only Geneva.

I still had to worry about the rest of it, which was the Daphne story nibbling around the edges of my mother’s infidelity. Jeremy had done a good job covering my marriage and divorce: how I met Holden (now Chauncey) at the Registry of Motor Vehicles instead of CVS; how he courted and married me under false pretenses, driven by trust-fund greed.

I didn’t mind that I came across as lovable-wacky, knocking on the playwright’s door the first minute I’d moved in, juggling plants, complaining about a yappy dog he didn’t own. Had he made notes of our early conversations, or did he have a recording device for an ear? He’d remembered the inedible wasabi truffles, the dialogue over the making and drinking of our first martini, then my free fall into easy virtue.

Jeremy had me going to the reunion reluctantly, sitting with Peter—now named Dr. Brendan Carswell—along with fellow graduates, including Eugene Palumbo. The doctor asked me to dance, then told me he’d been in love with his teacher, my mother, since the first yearbook staff meeting.

“Nope, we’re dropping that,” I told him.

Jeremy explained that the Peter-Brendan digression was necessary. All drama needs tension, a will-she-or-won’t-she thread; in this case, will Daphne have to spend the rest of her life wondering if Dr. Carswell was telling the truth?

“Since when is this a drama? What do I need tension for?”

He shuffled some pages. “Give me a few days,” he said.

I did. Before I read the new draft, he prefaced it with “I went a little meta.”

The fix: He borrowed from his own show, echoing the Riverdale subplot in which Archie the high schooler has an affair with Miss Grundy, the music teacher. Jeremy made it sound as if he’d taken a flight of narrative fancy—that he, the love interest/actor across the hall, had conflated real life with television.

“Wow. Not only does it work, but I think my dad could see this version of it.”

“Yes, he will, and he’ll take a bow. First, we’ll enlist Kathi.”

“For what?”

“She’ll work the poetic-license angle—that what did or didn’t go on between your mother and Brendon Carswell is left to the audience’s imagination.”

I said, “I don’t know . . .”

“She’s been great. I can’t imagine her turning down that request.”

“I’m just wondering if Kathi is a little sick of helping me lie to my dad.”

We were side by side in his kitchen, him chopping vegetables, me sautéing. There was a pause, his knife no longer hitting the cutting board, which is when he asked, “Did you ever wonder why your dad has to protect your mother? She cheated on him for who knows how long, and he took it. Maybe he’s been holding it in all these years. Maybe it would be therapeutic to come clean. Maybe he’d like the world to know the real June Maritch—”

“No! What happened is so embarrassing—she was the teacher, he was the principal, she ends up having an affair right under his nose, and he takes her back! If you think he’d like to air our dirty laundry, then you don’t know my dad.”

“Sorry. Just had to ask.” He nudged me. “For art’s sake. And remember what we discussed in the car: This isn’t ventriloquism. You’re in charge. You’ll deliver only what you want the audience to hear.”

What audience? I thought. Was this just pie in the sky? I did a little whining about how bad I was in acting class and how I dreaded the remaining lessons. Couldn’t I drop out now that I sort of had an acting job?

“No, you’re sticking it out, and you’ll tell your thankless teacher that you’ve been cast as the lead in a show that’s in previews.”

Sort of true. I was the one woman in a one-woman show. And who’s not to say that our repeated readings within these four walls weren’t previews? How’s this for the “reality of doing”? What had my instructor ever done anyway? Law & Order: SVU? What New York actor hadn’t? And the disrespectful way he talked over and around me when it came to lectures on the craft, he’d be lucky if we comped him a ticket.



Geneva was still down the hall, surely seething over my act of treachery, but there was an unaccustomed lack of harassment. No emails, no pounding on my door, no summons from some administrative agency that handled alleged stolen property of questionable ownership. Yet we wondered: Could Jeremy and I produce a show on the down low? Could we write about my trials and tribulations without naming the cause of them?

Unlike me, Jeremy didn’t feel the need to steer clear of her. He emailed, hinting he had something of a professional nature to discuss. She wrote back, “How’s tonight?”