Two weeks had passed since Derbhan Nevsky had visited the Bridget Mooney School of Acting, and he had used the time well. He had moved in on his old aquaintance, Ross Coe, the richest man he knew outside the entertainment industry. Nevsky had met Ross at the Carmel Yacht Club in the nineties. Nevsky represented a star who was deeply involved in the sailing world, and he spent a lot of time on boats because of it. He was amazed, at the time, at all that untapped money flying around, so close to Hollywood yet untouched by its itchy fingers. Sailing folk were, as a rule, conservative types who had their money tied up in bonds and property. They weren’t big risk takers. Yet Nevsky had always been convinced that, with the right approach, they could be bled and not even feel it. When he met Ross Coe, who had just had a nose job, the first of many plastic surgeries he was to suffer over the years for reasons only his psychiatrist understood, Derbhan recognized a man who could be led deep into uncharted waters. Coe was young, rich, bored out of his mind, and had some very strange predilections. Most people found him repulsive. Nevsky saw him as an opportunity waiting to happen—he just couldn’t figure out how to activate him at the time. Plus, luck was streaming in from all sides back then—he didn’t really need any more of it. But now that the gods had turned on him and he had been washed up on the shores of New York with nothing but his wits and the clothes on his back, he had to make friends with the natives. So, on instinct, he called Ross Coe, guessing he’d be bored enough and odd enough to want Derbhan Nevsky back in his life. He was right.
The parties at the Coes’ were filled with older men in bright-colored trousers, occasional women in their thirties and forties with ebbing looks and a hungry gleam in their eye, ready to snag any billionaire with most of his teeth in. Nevsky navigated his way through these grizzly affairs with his characteristic energy, limbs jerking this way and that, his shirt and jeans blindingly white, skin tanned as a well-cooked sausage. He flirted with the women and cajoled the men, made connections with people who had never heard of him before, who just thought of him as a veteran man in entertainment starting up a new company. He gradually became indispensable to the Coes, who were always desperate to entertain but lacked any real social magnetism, apart from their money, of which they had an enormous amount. The other reason they were a difficult sell socially was that Mrs. Coe, formerly Orschler, came from an old Nazi family. Her mother was the first cousin of Herta Schneider, Eva Braun’s best friend. When in her cups, Mrs. Coe had an alarming tendency to get nostalgic about the lovely Eva and her flawless skin, her generosity with the staff, and the sad fate that awaited her in that damn bunker. These musings did nothing to endear her to the Jewish element in the Hamptons, nor, in fact, any thinking people, and so the Coes were socially marooned when Nevsky came into their lives, forced to cruise nearby towns looking for likely acquaintances. The Coes were both allergic to solitude, especially the type that involved spending time alone with each other, and needed to be entertaining constantly in order to feel well in themselves—or, perhaps, in order to feel at all. Nevsky relieved them of the nightly burden of having nothing to say over dinner, he regaled them with stories about Hollywood personalities, he got them all excited about the company they were going to start together, made them feel part of it. In short, he breathed new life into their stale and decadent existence. Consequently, Ross Coe asked Nevsky if he’d like to come live in the guesthouse until the company was up and running. Nevsky pretended to think about it for a couple of days, and then he arrived with a large suitcase. He was, he felt, on his way. He had been punished enough.
It was scene night at the Bridget Mooney School of Acting. Nevsky was seated on a metal chair in the second row, behind Bridget. The girl who wouldn’t shake his hand came onstage, followed by a lanky young Southern guy. They were doing a scene from Orpheus Descending. The actor playing Val the drifter was relaxed, intense, a pro. The girl playing Carol Cutrere was kind of unbelievable. She played the part with no feminine mannerisms, yet she was intensely erotic. Her sexuality ran like dark sap through the scene. Her words, spoken with swaybacked diphthongs, sounded odd for the Southern Carol, yet every word she said sounded true. There was a moment—Nevsky had never seen anything like it—when Carol was begging Val to take a drive with her, and the girl put her hand on his arm. The man reacted as if he had been burned; the girl put her hand to her mouth, tears came to her eyes. When she said the lines “I’m an exhibitionist! I want to be noticed, seen, heard, felt! I want them to know I’m alive!” the words, filled with fury and pathos, seemed ripped from her soul. Nevsky got chills. This girl connected with an audience like a live electric wire.
Masha sat collapsed in the metal folding chair beside Hugh, knees together, feet pidgeon-toed, hands in her lap, waiting for the critique from Bridget and the class. She was still trying to make sense of what had happened. She had touched him; she remembered that part. She had touched him! The skin of her palm hurt when she did it, an ache she could still feel. She was forbidden to touch him, and yet she had done it. This was why she was not allowed to act. It had been inevitable. She couldn’t hear what Bridget was saying. The other students were talking, but she couldn’t focus. When Hugh stood up from his chair, she took her cue and followed him offstage.
“Are you all right?” he asked in his warm voice. She nodded, tears in her eyes.
“You want me to take you home?”
“I think if I just sit for a while …,” she said. Then she went into the bathroom and soaped her hands for a long time.
The minute Masha and Hugh left the stage, Bridget turned to Nevsky, twisting in her seat.
“Don’t say anything to her until I speak to you,” she said.
Back in Bridget’s office, Bridget held fast: she wouldn’t allow Nevsky to send Masha out on auditions for three months. She needed that time to work with her. In addition, she asked that Nevsky take on another student. Nevsky chose frazzle-haired Shelley, whose scene had come after Masha’s. Shelley was funny. She could do well on TV, he thought. Nevsky wanted Hugh too, but he already had an agent. Just as well; he never got along as well with the guys.
When Masha was on her way out of class that night, Nevsky slipped her his card.
“Bridget won’t let me send you out till later, but I want you to have this. I would love to represent you, when you’re ready,” he said.
The next day, Masha’s chest began to hurt again. She couldn’t sit up or laugh without pain. Pearl took care of her, kept her in bed. I never left her side, buzzing loyally around her as she swatted me away. Masha was very sad during that period. She kept thinking about walking down Sixth Avenue with the snow in her eyes, what it was like to be alone like that, and free.
She had to go to a cardiologist. She lay back as a nurse smeared her naked chest with lubricant, then fixed little suckers to her skin. Wires attached to the suckers made a picture of her heart, the nurse explained. Afterward, the young doctor came in and sat down.
“Well, we’ve done an EKG and an echocardiogram, and we can’t find anything wrong.”
“How can there not be anything wrong?” asked Pearl. “She can barely move!”
“Have a look at the echo from the hospital, when Masha was diagnosed with pericarditis,” said the shiny young man, clipping two X-rays up on a light board. “Here’s the one from the hospital. You can see the fluid around the heart, right? This little sort of dense sac? But in the one we took today, it’s clear.”
“How come I have pain, then?” asked Masha softly.
“Well, the brain is funny,” said the doctor. “It can remember the recipe for a certain pain. And when something happens to the mind, like stress, the brain sometimes recreates that pain.”
“But why?” asked Masha.
“We don’t know,” said the doctor.
“So you’re saying this is psychological?” said Pearl.
“Not exactly. It’s physiological pain, real pain, without a somatic cause. Sort of … ghost pain. A rogue symptom.”
“So what do we do?” asked Pearl.
“Be happy she doesn’t have pericarditis. And … give her Motrin.”
“But if there’s no inflammation, why should she take an anti-inflammatory?” asked Pearl.
The doctor shrugged. “For the pain,” he said, with a wisp of a smile. “There is a lot we don’t know about the brain, Mrs. Edelman.”
The following Tuesday, her chest had improved, but Masha skipped class. She went straight home from the nursing home instead. Touching Hugh in the scene had frightened her. She tried to keep busy, took extra hours at the nursing home, and began to earn a salary there. They said she was wonderful with the old people.
One afternoon, while she was on break, her phone rang. It was Shelley.
“What the heck happened to you, Masha? Are you okay?”
“I can’t come to class anymore,” said Masha.
“Are you sick?
“I was, but … that’s not why.”
“You’re crazy, girl, you were stupendous in that scene last time.”
“I just … it’s hard to explain.”
“Listen, Mr. Nevsky—you remember, that guy who gave you his card?”
“Yeah,” said Masha.
“Well, he wants to represent me too. And he said, if you and me want, there’s an apartment near the Hamptons we could have rent-free all summer! They would do everything for us—pay for everything, just till we’re ready to go out on auditions. Mr. Nevsky’s a friend of Bridget’s, he’s not some weirdo. And listen, Masha, I went there and checked it out and it’s amazing! The apartment is clean and pretty, and the guy’s mansion in Southhampton, where we would be most of the time, it’s like paradise, there’s an indoor pool and an outdoor pool and a sauna and fucking Pilates machines. The owner and his wife are a little creepy, but it’s a great deal. I’ll do it if you do it or maybe I’ll do it anyway, I need to get away. But I think they only want me if you come. Nevsky thinks you’re amazing. Masha?”
Masha was quiet. Her mind was blank.
“I … can’t,” she said.
“So what am I telling Bridget? You’re quitting class?”
“I guess so,” said Masha. “Yeah. Sorry. ’Bye.” She hung up the phone.