3

When Melanie Chisolm’s father showed up for a parents’ weekend, Paula Rubin took one look at him and said, “When you see some people’s parents, you understand why they’re the way they are.” With his shock of white hair, Melanie’s father looked to be about eighty, but he was not bent, nor was he shrunken. He stood an imperious six feet tall, and he wore a black homburg hat that heightened him even more. His overcoat, which was also black, had a velvet collar. To complete his darkling tintype he carried a gold-headed ebony walking stick. Everything about the man was formal and reserved. He was, in his manner and appearance, a model of an eminent Victorian.

To Paula, he explained a lot about Melanie. Why she dressed and made herself up and talked like a divorced woman of forty, for instance.

An only child, Melanie had arrived late in her parents’ lives. Three years after she was born, her mother had died of pernicious anemia.

Melanie had grown up as her father’s dinner companion. She’d sat at one end of the table, and he’d sat at the other. The table was twelve feet long, and it was surrounded by tall chairs with backs the same shape as windows in a cathedral. Sitting as a child at that table, while the maid came and went in a hush, Melanie would cast her eyes upward at the gessoed ceiling. The ceiling was painted with garlands and cherubs. Melanie would dream of cavorting naked with these happy creatures, all ringlets and big toes, in some giddy, cloud-upholstered place where there were no chairs that kneed you in the spine.

As a high school girl Melanie found a substitute for that place in the dramatic club. She played Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Wrapped in gossamer, she bounded across the stage night after night. She had emerged from the hard, dry cocoon of her childhood with wings on, but those wings were not just for flight. Melanie quickly learned to wrap them around her body so she could resist the adolescent cold and damp that all her friends felt.

Oberon, who was sixteen and lanky, asked Melanie out. In the back of his car, he went fishing in her clothes with his hands.

After five minutes of his explorations, Melanie, raising her head, said, “God, do you ever sweat.”

The summer she graduated from high school Melanie’s father sent her on a trip to Europe. In Zurich she met a French ski instructor. He was twenty-six, and had a smile that breathed on Melanie’s heart.

But of course he was French, and his recipe for involvement was high heat followed by a whisk.

By mid-August Melanie knew she would be returning to the States, and to American men, with their bathing suits as bulky as her father’s Brooks Brothers boxer shorts. She thanked God that she’d been accepted by a college with a theater program.

In her three and a half years at Blake University, Melanie had—as a sideline to her involvement with the theater—slept with six more men, two of them graduate students and one a professor of English. The professor was of course the sweatiest. He was married.

Sleeping with David Whitman had been a big mistake, though. He seemed to want to sleep with women in order to prove something, which was a common enough urge among men, Melanie knew. But then he would lapse into this terrible postcoital depression, as if all the banging had worn away the crust of the earth, to reveal a vast, empty cavern beneath the bed. Acting wasn’t enough for David, and sex wasn’t enough, either. Melanie didn’t care to think about what it was that he wanted and needed, and couldn’t seem to get, because when she turned her mind in that direction she would feel a vague sense of vacuum from a place in her chest close to her heart.

It was better for her head to ignore such sensations and just go on with the show.

Melanie was happy that she and Paula would very likely be playing Goneril and Regan in this, the last show of their undergraduate careers. They might have been rivals, for they were the same height, about five-six, and they had essentially the same hair, a changeable auburn, and of course they were the same age. But something about Melanie always landed her the older parts, while Paula was given the younger roles.

This would be the first time they’d be playing sisters instead of women a generation apart. They’d finally be recognizing onstage a comfortable kinship that had been there all along.

Supposedly Riddiford was pressuring Morris from the English department to try out for the role of Gloucester.

Morris was the professor Melanie had slept with.

If she was to play Regan, she would be gouging out his eyes, every night for a week and a half.

That, Melanie thought, was truly show biz.

Eventually she and Paula and Kathy organized themselves unofficially into a League of Women Actors. The league’s mission was to promote a sense of civic responsibility—to making life as theatrical as possible.

To this end, the members of the league carried on most of their conversations in stage whispers and scrambled their clothes closets until every outfit came out as a costume. Instead of idling away hours in the student union or the library, the three young women entertained themselves by creating dramatic moments, as they did the time Melanie insisted that they spy on one of the practices of the men’s swim team.

That command performance took place on a Wednesday evening in the winter of their junior year.

When the league entered the gym, most of the college’s students were still at dinner or already studying. But Melanie, her sharp eyes brimming with slyness, was leading her two friends along the darkened corridors with a penlight.

“What if a janitor or somebody comes and sees us?” Paula said.

“They all quit work at four-thirty,” Melanie replied. Ahead was a trophy case and a pair of doors with a light shining in the crack between them.

They crept stealthily toward their goal.

Melanie looked through the crack first,

“Ah,” she said.

“Lemme look,” said Paula.

She took a peek. Her eyes widened and she covered her month.

“Wanna see, Kath?” Melanie offered.

Kathy poked her head under Paula’s shoulder.

Then she said, “Oh, aren’t they cute?”

“I told you,” Melanie said. “They always practice in the nude.”

“What incredible bodies they have,” Paula said. “Look at the one with the curly blond hair.”

“I am,” said Melanie. “Isn’t this too delicious? If they only knew. We’re committing sacrilege, you know. They’re so-o-o sensitive about their privates. They think their pubies are sacred.”

Looking through the crack again, Paula said, “Ooh, that blond one, I just can’t imagine a guy being self-conscious about having one as big as—”

“All American men are self-conscious about their bodies,” Melanie replied. “Just try to imagine an American man on a nude beach, like St. Tropez.”

“God forbid,” Paula said. “I’m sure if some of the men I see at Jones Beach ever started walking around in the nude, I’d lose my appetite for Chilly-Willies.”

“Nobody’s body is anything to be ashamed of, whether it’s good or bad,” Kathy insisted.

“You can say that because you’re in the theater,” Melanie told her. “Actors don’t care if they’re in sequins or skin.”

“What are you saying? That if you’re an actor you have to be an exhibitionist?” Paula asked.

“No,” said Melanie. “What I’m saying is that if you’re an actor who’s any good, when you’re on stage you’ve got nothing to hide.”

“You’re right,” Kathy agreed. “When I’m acting, it’s as if I’m talking about all my innermost hopes and dreams—in other people’s words.”

“It’s different for me,” Paula said. “I can’t turn myself inside out emotionally like you can, Kath. I’m not sure who I am when I’m acting. Only that I’m somebody who is definitely not my mother.”

Turning her attention back to the long and narrow peephole, Paula added, “If only my mother could see this. My mother…and David’s mother.”

“They’d probably flip out,” Kathy said.

“No…no, they wouldn’t,” Paula replied. “They’d do something like this.” She pressed her fingers into the bridge of her nose and snorted as if her sinuses were blocked.

“What’s that?” Melanie asked.

“My mother doing a yoga exercise,” Paula replied. “To clear her mind of men’s bodies.”