Homesick for Another World(49)

I had no desire to speak to my mother. I took a mint candy from the crystal bowl on Mrs. Honigbaum’s desk. “My mother and I don’t really get along,” I said.

Mrs. Honigbaum put down her pen. Her shoulders slumped. I could see the fringe of her real hair poking out from under her wig in short gray tufts across her forehead. Tight bubbles of sweat, murky with makeup, studded the deep lines of her wrinkled cheeks. “You think you’re the first? My mother was a terror. She beat me black and blue, made me chew on bars of soap any time I mouthed off. She forced me to walk miles in the rain to get her plums from a tree, then beat me because they were full of worms. And yet I mourn her passing. I’m a grown woman, and still I cry. You only have one mother. Mine got starved to death and thrown in a trench full of rotting corpses. You are lucky yours is still living. If I were a Christian I would cross myself. Now go call her. You know she loves you.” And still I didn’t call.

I felt safe at Mrs. Honigbaum’s house. I trusted her. She said there’d been an incident only once. A girl had stolen one of her rings. “It was a ruby, my mother’s birthstone,” she told me dolefully. Because of that, it was forbidden to bring guests into the house. I had a lock on my door but I never used it. There was a guest bathroom all the tenants shared. We had to sign our names to book shower time on a piece of paper taped up in the hallway. Mrs. Honigbaum never gossiped about the tenants, but I had the sense that I was the one she liked best. One tenant was a voice actor for some cartoon show I’d never heard of. He walked around barefoot and shirtless, perpetually gargling and speaking in a falsetto, to keep his vocal cords from seizing, he explained. There was also a man in his thirties, which seemed ancient to me at the time. He was always widening his eyes as though he’d just seen something unbelievable. He had deep creases in his forehead as a result. I saw him carrying a painting to his car once. It was a portrait of Dracula. He said a friend was borrowing it for a music video. Another guy was an aspiring makeup artist. He always wore flip-flop sandals, and I could hear him flapping up and down the hall at odd hours. Once I caught him without any clothes on, thrusting his genitals into the cold steam of the refrigerator. When I cleared my throat, he just turned around and flapped back down the hall.

My room was next door to Mrs. Honigbaum’s office, so from morning to night I could hear celebrity news blaring from her six or seven televisions. The noise didn’t really bother me. Every morning when I passed her open doorway on the way to the shower, her maid would be spraying the carpet where the poodle had shit. Stacks of old tabloids flapped in the breeze from an industrial-sized fan. The poodle was old and its hair was yellowed and reddish in spots that made it look like it was bleeding. It was always having “bathroom mishaps,” as Mrs. Honigbaum called them. Whenever Rosa, the maid, saw me without a shirt on, she covered her eyes with her hands. Mrs. Honigbaum sat at her desk and stared at her television screens, sweating and taking notes. It seemed like she never went to bed.

“Good morning,” I’d say.

“A sight to behold,” exclaimed Mrs. Honigbaum. “Rosa, isn’t he beautiful?” Rosa didn’t seem to speak English. “Ah! My menopause,” Mrs. Honigbaum cried, shoveling barium supplements past her dentures. “Thanks for reminding me. Look at you.” She shook her head. “People will think I’m running a brothel. Go get yourself some lemonade. I insist. Rosa. Lemonade. Dónde esta? la lemonade?” With all the rejection I got at auditions, it was nice to be home and be somebody’s favorite.

? ? ?

One afternoon, as I was coming in from tanning, Mrs. Honigbaum invited me to dine with her. It was only five o’clock. “Someone was going to come, so Rosa cooked. But now he’s not coming. Please join me, or else it will go to waste.” I had the night off from work, so I happily accepted her invitation. The kitchen was all dark wood, with orange counters and a refrigerator the size of a Buick. The white tablecloth was stained with coffee rings. “Sit,” said Mrs. Honigbaum as she pulled the meat loaf from the oven. Her oven mitts were like boxing gloves over her tiny, knobby hands. “Tell me everything,” she said. “Did you have any auditions today? Any breaks?”

I’d spent most of the day on a bus out to Manhattan Beach, where Bob Sears said a guy would be expecting me at his apartment. I arrived late and rang the doorbell. When the door opened, a seven-foot-tall black man appeared. He plucked my head shot out of my hands, pulled me inside, took a Polaroid of me without my shirt on, gave me his card and a can of 7UP, and pushed me out the door. “It was a quick meeting,” I told Mrs. Honigbaum. “I didn’t have many lines to read.”

She slid a woven-straw place mat in front of me, plunked down a knife and fork. “I’m glad it went so well. Others have a harder time of it. They take things too personally. That’s why I know you’re going to make it big. You’ve got a thick skin. Just don’t make the same mistake I made,” she said. “Don’t fall in love. Love will ruin you. It turns off the light in your eyes. See?” Her eyes were small, blurry, and buried under wrinkled, blue-shadowed lids and furry fake lashes. “Dead,” she affirmed. She pointed upward to the ceiling. “Every day I mourn.” She cleared her throat. “Now here, eat this.” She returned to the table with a dinner plate piled high with meat loaf. I hadn’t eaten a home-cooked meal since Gunnison, so I devoured it quickly. She herself ate a small bowl of cottage cheese. “That is kasha,” she said, pointing to a boiling pot on the stove. “I would offer you some, but you’ll hate it. It tastes like cats. I make it at night and eat it for breakfast, cold, with milk. I’m an old lady. I don’t need much. But you, you eat as much as you can stomach. And tell me more. What did Bob say? He must be very proud of you for all you’re doing. I hope you’re going to call your mother.”