June 2002
Something wonderful happened. I got a writing job on a hit television series that filmed in New York. In the past year I’d established myself as a writer of one-hour “dramedies”—funny, character-based shows about relationships. There were only a handful of dramedies on-air, which meant the window for employment was tiny. This series was the only one of its kind filming in New York that year. The single, highly coveted job in my field that would enable me to both move forward in my career and be near my sick mother had just dropped from the sky. What were the chances?
There was one small glitch. Nine years earlier, at twenty-three, I had gotten into a vicious fight with a girl over my then-boyfriend. Jonathan Marc Sherman is a playwright, and our four-year relationship was full of drama. Throughout the years, we would famously break up for a week or so and then get back together. This girl, who had become entangled with him during one of our off-weeks, wanted to hang around once I was back in the picture, and I was not having it. It was a clash of notable intensity, and she and I had not seen each other since. She’d grown up to become a successful actress and, as fate would have it, she was the star of this show. I decided to call Lisa to clear the air before work began. I expected to laugh off the behavior of our younger selves, schedule a date for coffee, and become friends. Granted, my call caught her off-guard, but it did not go well. She was tense and abrupt. I hung up feeling uneasy.
I had found the perfect New York sublet—a small but charming one-bedroom walk-up on Barrow Street in the West Village. The restaurant One if by Land, Two if by Sea, a romantic landmark set in an old carriage house, was my next-door neighbor. My rickety building was set back in a courtyard and had full advantage of the lush gardens that ringed the restaurant. In the stairwell, the paint was peeling and the carpet threadbare, but decent prints hung in old frames on the walls and the overall vibe was artsy. The apartment itself had wood-beamed ceilings and a working fireplace. It was a gem.
I was grateful to be employed in New York so I could be close to my mother, but I had not anticipated just how close. Shortly after beating breast cancer, my mother had quit the garment center. She felt that the stress of her career might have contributed to her getting cancer, so she walked away from designing clothes after thirty-seven years and resolved to create a more peaceful life. Within a year, she’d opened a store of antique dishes and glassware in Southampton that rivaled the top floor of Bergdorf’s. It was a serious business that required a lot of work, but at least the setting was the bucolic Hamptons.
Part two of her life change was walking away from her thirty-five-year marriage. In a rather late midlife crisis, my mother divorced my father, claiming she’d married too young and never had the chance to find herself—she’d gone straight from a rocky life with Harriette to living with Fred. They had separated two years before her ovarian cancer diagnosis, and during that time she’d lived on Long Island full-time. Suddenly, she needed to be in the city several days a week for doctors’ appointments. After Harriette died, my mother began renovating her Midtown apartment; it was still under construction, which meant my mother had no place to stay. That’s how she wound up moving into the Barrow Street apartment with me.
There was one queen-size bed, and my mother and I shared it three, sometimes four or five nights a week. I never knew how to answer the question “Are you close to your mother?” We’d gone through that strained period when I was twenty-five that fizzled out when she got sick. Overall, we didn’t speak the same language, and she didn’t follow the saga of my daily life, but we had a primal closeness. I was prone to nightmares and even as a grown-up I would sometimes call and wake my mom in the middle of the night to be assured that it was just a bad dream and all was well. People thought it was extreme that my sister and I spent every night with my mother in the hospital, sleeping on a cot. They called that kind of closeness “unusual.” It never occurred to us that it could be otherwise—it was a given in our family that my mother would never be left alone. Similarly, when my mother needed a place to stay, though I was a thirty-two-year-old working woman, there was never any question that she could crash with me and share my bed.
During the day, my mother was a dynamo—always moving, shopping, working. No one would guess she was a cancer patient on aggressive chemotherapy. The hours of my new job were grueling—I’d leave at nine in the morning and get home around one or two a.m. During the seven or eight hours spent in the apartment, I was desperate for sleep, but would get very little. At night, my mother was haunted by her cancer. Propped up on the pillows in a silk nightie, she would voice her fears. “What if the little grains of rice are spreading? What if the chemo isn’t working? What if my CA-125 numbers go up? What will become of me?” She was terrified that she might have only five years to live. “There are so many things I’ve always wanted to do—now my time is running out. Where do I begin?” She sat up all night, every night, eyes wide with fear. I was just as scared, but I tried my best to console her. Sometimes she cried; the rest of the time she stared into the darkness. She never slept.
Then there was the new job. The writers began work several weeks before the actors so that scripts could be written and ready for production. The show was going into its third season, and with two exceptions the writing staff from the previous year had been fired and we were all brand-new. The creators of the show sequestered themselves in a private wing of the production offices, never to be seen. They communicated with the writing staff via messages delivered by a minion who scurried back and forth between their offices and the writers’ room. The new head writer, or “show-runner,” Adrian—my immediate boss—was baffled by this system. He was a former stand-up comic with an extremely dry, twisted sense of humor. He was low-key, generous to writers, and his understated, ironic way of speaking was pitch-perfect. We all loved him.
Writers shared personal stories in the room, and the result was we got to know one another fast. Adrian was a dark character. His first wife, Cinnamon, had been an exotic dancer. They had a child together. Bill Maher was a friend of Adrian’s and had once told him, “You don’t marry the girl who jumps out of the cake.” Once, Cinnamon sued Adrian on The People’s Court for throwing a car seat at her, bruising her leg and causing her to miss work. Adrian’s defense to Judge Wapner was one terse, ironic line: “Your Honor, she’s a stripper.” He lost. He was fined two hundred dollars. When things didn’t work out with Cinnamon, Adrian found a new, lovely wife while he was abroad doing a comedy tour and brought her back to the States to raise his kid. They had three more children. He’d recently left her and she was reportedly heartbroken. Adrian was charming and warm in the writers’ room, but he had a chilling lack of empathy. No topic was too sacred for his scathing humor: his divorce, terrorist attacks, suicide. It was once said of Charles Bukowski: “He was a very tender-hearted guy—not towards people necessarily, but towards goldfish.” When I read that quote years later, I thought of Adrian.
On day four of the job, we’d left the writers’ room for a five-minute break and had scattered to our respective offices when, suddenly, an e-mail from Adrian appeared on my screen. It read: “Hey. How’s work?” I was surprised and flustered. From another type of guy, perhaps this could be construed as an innocent inquiry—not from this man. I understood the meaning and implication of that three-word e-mail at once. It was the Hugh Grant moment in the first Bridget Jones. Though not as florid as “You appear to have forgotten your skirt,” it was the moment of crossing a boundary, establishing private dialogue, initiating flirtation. I remember staring at the screen, feeling flushed, aware of imminent danger. This guy was incredibly attractive. Handsome, seductive, with ice-blue eyes and a knowing glint. Though he was separated from his second wife, she still called the office several times a day. On top of which he was my boss. My computer screen might as well have been flashing BEWARE in fiery letters. My first instinct was that I must not engage. Could I just ignore the e-mail? Then I told myself I was overreacting. He was flirting, so what? I could handle myself. I dashed off an equally innocuous response to his note (“Work’s great”), shut down the computer, and returned to the writers’ room as if nothing had happened. That was the beginning of my descent.
THE FIRST FEW DAYS following her chemo treatment, my mother would become extremely nauseous. Those nights and mornings would be spent on the cold tiles of Barrow Street’s tiny bathroom floor. I held my mom’s hair back while she hung over the toilet, trying to decide whether she was finished or was going to be seized by another bout of sickness. My mom had cut her hair to just above the shoulders, which, for her, was short. Because she’d been growing out the color, the top half of her hair was now silvery gray, while the bottom half remained brown. It was a strange, two-toned look, but she preferred it to cutting her hair any shorter. For the first time in over twenty years, my mother stopped exercising. She told me that walking required all of her strength.
WITHIN TWENTY-FOUR HOURS of the Hugh Grant move, Adrian was giving me the full-court press. Nobody knew, of course. The first eight weeks of the job were about Resisting Adrian and required monumental effort. It became rapidly clear that he had no moral compass. I called him Mephistopheles, which he loved. Like the devil, he was intelligent and achingly seductive, a sensualist, with persuasive arguments for joining him on the dark side. I had always been a good girl—the most rebellious thing I’d ever done was legally change my name. Even if he had been a person of decent character, this job was the one positive thing in my life—getting involved with my boss would jeopardize not only my job, but my reputation in the industry, too. To protests that he was my boss, Adrian replied: “So what? This is the stuff legends are made of. Our love cannot be hidden.” Adrian bandied the word love about like a badminton birdie. He claimed he’d fallen in love with me at first sight. Many of the things he said sound ridiculous on paper—it was his half-earnest, half-ironic, twinkle-eyed delivery that would slay me. The pull toward him was magnetic. He’d stop by my desk under the pretense of some work matter, catch my eyes with his hypnotic gaze, and try to persuade me to go on a date with him. I’d fall deeply under his spell for a minute or two and then snap myself out of it with a jolt. Rattled, I’d ask him to please refrain from ruining my life as I proceeded to throw him (my boss) out of my office.
Even in the earliest stages, I saw Resisting Adrian as a kind of epic battle, with my soul in the balance. I had worked hard at becoming the woman of integrity I wanted to be—one slip and I could wipe out years of effort. Was I really going to throw myself away over this indulgence? I was afraid I might. When I was apart from him, I was clear. But in his presence my mind melted, and I was being paid to sit in a writers’ room with him for twelve hours a day. I resorted to creative antics to stop myself from yielding: I hand-copied passages from books that had moral weight and taped them around the apartment, hoping they’d serve as an antidote. I put up quotes from Joseph Campbell, Buddhist texts, and the twelve steps of Alcoholics Anonymous. While I was arming myself with wisdom of the ages, the actors finally arrived. What happened next was so uncanny it seemed scripted. The actress Lisa met Adrian just once and began an immediate, aggressive pursuit of him, unwittingly recreating our romantic triangle. While I was summoning moral fortitude to resist his advances, the beautiful blond starlet—my former rival—was parading around the writers’ offices, flouncing into Adrian’s desk chair.
Lisa was everything I was not, which is what had made her threatening to me the first time around. We were a variation on Betty and Veronica. She was the all-American blond cover girl who had effortlessly ascended as a star in TV and film. I was a brunette writer and failed actress who self-destructed in front of the camera. My inability to get a headshot photo in which I wasn’t grimacing was one of the factors that had led me to quit. She was athletic and outdoorsy. At the time she’d just filmed some cable special in which she swam with dolphins. I was a Woody Allen–style neurotic New Yorker who stayed out of direct sunlight. In spite of the Alice-in-Wonderland looks that landed Lisa ingenue parts, offscreen her sexuality was bold and explicit. In the table-reading for the first episode of the show, she wore a black T-shirt with two fried eggs where her breasts would be. I was her negative image in my feminine white peasant blouses. The office was abuzz with the flirtation of Adrian and the actress. By this point, Adrian knew of my history with Lisa and tried to use it as ammunition: “I won’t go out with her if you’ll agree to see me.” I rolled my eyes and stood my ground. They went on a date. I was in pain. I was curious to note how acute the pain was. I tried to detach from it, observe it as a sociological study. Beneath the pain, however, I believed this turn of events to be good luck. Getting involved with Adrian would be a certain train wreck. The best thing that could happen to me and my higher self would be for Adrian to become Lisa’s boyfriend.
About a week passed, during which Adrian was constantly getting buzzed on the intercom in the writers’ room and told that Lisa was on the phone. I couldn’t help but notice he got just as many messages from his not-quite-ex-wife. Adrian and I had been in a cold war since I’d last turned him down and he’d decided to go on a date with Lisa. We interacted professionally all day, but we were chilly to each other outside of the room. He’d abruptly dropped his pursuit of me. This was a good thing, I told myself. My integrity would remain intact. Unfortunately, rather than abating, my pain was now raging. I was stuck with him in that airless room all day and most of the night, hopelessly smitten. On breaks, I’d write in my journal, trying to deconstruct my psyche. What was the matter with me? Was this really about him, or about losing out to that girl? Honest scrutiny led me to believe his relationship with Lisa stung, but my craziness over him had predated her. In the writers’ room, I kept up my detached air, but I sometimes slipped out of the room to weep secretly in my office. I was disgusted at myself for wasting this emotion over him. I was amazed at the ferocity of my suffering, yet at no point did I connect it to the pain I was feeling over my mother.
At the end of the week Lisa made an appearance in the writers’ wing. After spending a good deal of time behind closed doors in Adrian’s office, she made a beeline for mine. She waltzed in and shut the door behind her. This took me by surprise. Since the actors’ arrival at work, she and I had had minimal interaction, and when we had spoken, the tone had been merely civil. Now Lisa sat on my sofa and asked with affected brightness how my time at the show had been so far. How did I like the writers? Did I like any of them in particular? Her gaze was direct. Not even a thin, wispy veil hung over the fact that she was asking about my relationship with Adrian. I deflected, steering the conversation toward people we’d had in common years ago. I told her Jonathan was now engaged, his wedding set for the spring. Before she could get me back on track, a PA knocked and said she was needed in Makeup. She left and I shut the door behind her. I sat back down at my desk and then there was another knock. Adrian entered, shutting the door behind him, his face flushed.
“What did she say to you?”
“What do you care? What the hell is going on?”
Adrian sat on the edge of the sofa. He launched into an emotional monologue about how the silence between us was killing him. He said all he talked about with Lisa was me, which had rightly made her suspicious.
“You’re perfect for me—you’re like a Winona Ryder who reads. I can’t be with her—she swims with dolphins on cable! Please, please meet me outside of work for lunch, breakfast, anything.”
And with that, I yielded.