Trust Exercise(49)

I wasn’t a star dancer at Carnegie Mellon, but when I gave up dance I didn’t run home, I did the opposite. I went to New York anyway, just when all our classmates who’d gone to NYU and even Juilliard were leaving. New York was “too hard, too expensive, too lonely,” but I’d never expected New York would be easy or cheap or a place I’d have friends. I’d never been a star and I didn’t expect to be treated like one. I did well in New York. I had a job, I had a place to live on my own. And then one night I opened the door of my apartment and there was my mother, in a brand-new ankle-length faux-fur coat that some man had bought her to keep her southern self warm in the cold New York weather. She’d gotten some man to get her to New York and she was grinning like a naughty little girl at how clever she was, actually hopping up and down on my doormat. I left immediately and moved to LA, where my brother was finishing school. It took our mother three years to unhook from the man from New York and rehook to a man from LA; by the time she caught up, an unexpected change had come over me. I wanted to go home. I loved it and missed it. I’d only wanted to leave in the first place because my mother lived there, and she no longer did. So I told her in no uncertain terms what would happen if she followed me again, and told my brother to do the same thing, but he couldn’t. My mother had always forgotten about him, raising him with the sort of benign neglect that left him wanting more of her instead of realizing she was a toxin. My mother and brother still live in LA, while I live in the city all three of us think of as home. When I visit my brother, he doesn’t tell our mother I’m coming. When he visits me, he doesn’t tell her he’s going. He pretends that he’s traveling on business. And though I’m sad that this saddens my brother, what would happen if my mother had contact with me would be worse than his sadness, and both of them know this.

After I moved home, I often ran into the person we’ve been calling David. His boomerang flight had been longer than Melanie’s, shorter than mine. He’d been back in our town for two years. He’d started a theatre company which put on the darkest, most disturbing plays David could think of in the same sorts of places where we’d gone to hear music in high school, the rusty ice houses or the abandoned warehouses or the seedy dance clubs. David had failed at acting at Northwestern and he’d switched to playwriting and failed at that because he never finished the plays he started and he’d switched to directing and turned out to be very good at it. People came to see the plays he put on, despite their being dark and disturbing and staged in weird inconvenient locations. The person whom we’re calling Mr. Kingsley became a regular audience member, and then a regular donor, and then, as David’s company started getting its shit together and applying for nonprofit status and grants, even a member of the advisory board. When you saw Mr. Kingsley and David standing around at one of David’s fund-raisers, Mr. Kingsley drinking whatever red wine was on hand from a clear plastic cup, David drinking whatever showily cheap “blue-collar” beer was on hand from a can, the two of them talking intently as if they were completely alone in the loud, crowded room about whatever dark and disturbing play David was currently staging, you saw two members of the same Elite Brotherhood of the Arts.

Mr. Kingsley, when we were his students, never explained this Elite Brotherhood in the way that he was constantly explaining the idea of stardom, through everything he tried to teach us, and all the ways we didn’t measure up. The idea of stardom, of honing your talent and unleashing it on the world, organized everything that we did—but what he never told us was that the Elite Brotherhood of the Arts organized the stardom. Mr. Kingsley was clearly a member. And now David was clearly a member. That was strange and even funny only if you stood apart and noticed that it was a brotherhood, with membership and rules, and not a God-given Order of Things. During the period when David’s company got its shit together to apply for nonprofit status and grants, Karen lent them her organizational skill set, in case this hasn’t already been guessed. She was the getter-together of the company’s shit, though she never sought credit or even a paycheck. She was happy to make that contribution to David’s success. So few of their peers had succeeded, so few had found stardom—but of all people, cynical David had made a place, right there in their hometown, for surviving ambition. Now the Theatre kids went straight from CAPA graduation to David’s auditions, and Mr. Kingsley employed David as a “visiting artist” to teach the “master class” in directing. Karen donated her evenings and weekends to the company’s “office” and “books” and its near fatal, before she intervened, unpaid-tax fiasco. David, in gratitude to her, insisted she come to a fund-raising gala, at which he dragged her over to Mr. Kingsley, who beamed and nodded and chitchatted with her while gracefully if not successfully trying to hide the fact that he had no idea who she was.

Karen was content, she told David, with having given up performing. She was just as content as he was. But David, perhaps because over the years he’d developed a sort of ardent artistic flattery as the only currency with which he could pay all the people he owed money to, refused to believe this. “Come on,” he said. “You got into Carnegie Mellon. Unlike me you can actually sing. You can fucking tap-dance.”

“I’m an awful tap dancer.” This was true. The limitations of body type, mentioned above, made tap dancing an imperfect fit. In tap as in ballet you want lanky; only modern can accommodate the dancer who’s built like a swimmer.