CHAPTER TWELVE

RICK

“Fired?” I was screaming at Joel; it was a testament either to his professionalism or to his friendship that he didn’t hang up on me. “They can’t fire me! I have a contract, a fucking pay-or-play contract!”

“Yes,” Joel agreed calmly, “and they’ve elected to pay.”

I didn’t know whether I was more angry or astonished. “They’re paying me off? All because of that asshole director?”

“Richard,” Joel said, the strain starting to appear in his voice, “calm down and listen to me. You’re in trouble here, you need help—”

“From who?” I snapped. “From you? Can you get me back the part?”

“No, I can’t. That’s not—”

“Then what the fuck good are you?” I shouted. “You’re supposed to be my agent, you’re supposed to handle these things—”

“Forget the goddamn part,” Joel said, finally raising his voice. “It’s you that’s the problem, not them! You need—”

I screamed an obscenity and hung up on him. I threw the phone across the room and into the entertainment center, gutting the CD player in the process. Not content to limit the destruction to that, in my rage I turned to the most breakable things I could find: I put a foot through one of the nine-hundred-dollar stereo speakers; I snapped up a heavy ceramic ashtray and hurled it into a framed Harrill print, shattering the glass, a volley of splinters erupting outward and draping the carpet, the couch, the coffee table. When the phone, off its hook, continued its insistent wail, I yanked the cord from the wall and sent the whole thing flying into the kitchen, where it bounced off a cabinet and into the sink, smashing the half dozen wineglasses and coffee cups left in the basin.

I stood there amid the carnage, taking it in with perverse satisfaction. I wanted to do more, but I was breathing raggedly, my energy lagging far behind my rage. I went to my stash for a quick hit, but it was empty—only the merest grains sticking to a corner of the tin. I became still angrier at that, but now the lassitude, the exhaustion was really taking hold of me. Bitter, angry and frustrated, I slumped into a chair—one not covered with glass, or torn and grazed by flying objects—and closed my eyes, my jaw tight, my hands balled into impotent, useless fists. That bastard, Jonathan; he did this to me. He’d been out to get me from the start. I’d kill him, I’d tear his fucking balls off. As soon as I could find the strength to get up out of this damned chair; as soon as I could stop my goddamn hands from trembling.

I sat there for—I’m not sure for how long; I was aware only of my trembling, of my anger, and of a change in the light in the room. However long it was, there finally came the click of a key in a lock. I looked up as the door opened, as Catlin entered the apartment, breezily at first—then stopped dead as she saw the shambles around her.

“Oh, my heavens,” she said, softly. “Oh, Lord.”

She surveyed the damage with horrified disbelief, saw me sequestered in my little corner of the room, clutching a pillow against my chest as though to ward off God knows what. “Richard?” she said uncertainly. “Are you all right?”

My voice, I found, was hoarse and scratchy. “I need a hit,” I said, ignoring the concern in her voice, ignoring her, really; only one thing mattered just then. But Catlin didn’t take out her stash; she dropped her purse at the door, walked slowly across the room, crouched down beside me. “Richard, what happened?”

She paled as I told her about my fight with Jonathan; flinched when I related the message from Joel and the conversation that followed. When I’d finished she let out a long, sad sigh, silently went back across the room to recover her purse, then sat down in the chair opposite mine and shakily lit a cigarette.

“I’ll be fine. Honest,” I said in a tone that belied the words. “All I need’s a couple lines to get me past this.”

She took a deep pull on her Salem, then shook her head slowly. “No,” she said. “I think you’ve had enough.”

My anger flared again, and briefly I had some energy. I tossed aside my pillow and stood. “You think? Who gives a flying fuck what you think, just give me a lousy hit, for Chrissake!”

She stood, meeting my gaze coolly, evenly; she put her hands on my shoulders, trying to calm me down.

“Honey,” she said, “you’re out of control. We’ve got to bring you down, okay?”

I shook off her hands. “Just give me the goddamned coke!” I screamed. I lunged for her purse, snapped it up and open. As I fumbled through it, searching for her stash box, she grabbed the purse away from me, yanking it so hard that its contents went flying, scattered across the living room floor. I fell to my hands and knees, rummaging for the stash; but Catlin found it before me, snatched it up, and bolted out the living room and down the hall.

“Catlin!” I yelled, running after her. “God damn it!” She dashed into the downstairs bathroom, slamming the door—and by the time I forced it open I saw, to my horror, that she had emptied the entire contents of her coke tin into the toilet, flushing it just as I entered. I watched, aghast, as the white powder dissolved on contact with the water, then in a cloudy spiral was sucked down the drain.

I stood there, stunned, lost, and betrayed. She saw the betrayal, I know, because I saw the guilt reflected in her eyes; she rinsed the stash box of any remaining particles, then headed back down the corridor to the living room. I followed her, hearing an unwelcome catch to my voice. “Why?” I asked her, hating the plaintive, pathetic way I sounded, even to myself. “Catlin, for God’s sake—”

She started moving toward the kitchen. “Come on, we’ll fix some coffee and—”

The anger suddenly flared back, fierce as ever.

“You fucking bitch!” I yelled at her, so loud it made her jump. “Isn’t this what you wanted? Isn’t this what you were so turned on by?”

She stopped; turned, slowly. She looked at me, and now the guilt in her was nearly palpable; she looked tired and sick, in a way I had never seen in her.

“Sex is one thing,” she said flatly. “Career is another. That’s where I draw the line.” She moved closer, putting a hand briefly to my arm. “You lost a job, honey. You stepped over the line.”

I shook off her touch. “And you never have?”

“No,” she said. “Never. Because I can handle it, and…” She took another cigarette from her discarded pack, lit it. “… and you can’t.”

“Oh. Well. That explains everything, then,” I said coldly, pacing back and forth as she sat back down in her chair. “You’re Supergirl, and I’m a mere mortal.”

She took a deep drag off her cigarette, tossed back her long blonde hair, and sighed. “Richard, I do maybe two hits a day; some people can do only two hits a day. Lots more can’t. You’re one of them. My trouble”—she frowned, took a pull on her cigarette—“was in not seeing that, soon enough.”

I fixed her with an icy look, my thoughts starting to coalesce again. “No,” I said coldly. “Your trouble was seeing, but not caring—until I crossed this invisible line of yours you never bothered to tell me about.”

She considered that a long moment, then nodded slowly.

“Yes,” she said, very quietly. “That’s quite right. I deserved that.” She stood, stubbing out her cigarette.

“I’ll be right back. Then we’ll fix you up that coffee, and a sandwich, too, maybe, okay?”

She went down the hall to the bathroom, I thought, then some minutes later returned to the kitchen. She put the coffee on, rummaged about in the refrigerator, then—after carefully disposing of the shards of glass in the sink, not to mention the dismembered telephone—improvised a lunch for both of us. I was starting to feel tired again and felt a mother of a headache coming on, but my head was clearing enough to feel a creeping dismay come over me as I surveyed the ruined apartment. Good God, what was I thinking of? What had I done?

By the time Catlin came back with the coffee and sandwiches, I had regained enough of my sanity and worked up enough of my nerve to say, “Okay. So I’ve got to get off this stuff. What do I do, check myself into the Betty Ford Clinic or what?”

“A bit dramatic,” she said, taking a swallow of coffee. “You’d only need that if you’d been at this for months. You’ve just been on a binge, that’s all. Four or five days should be all you need to clean out your system.” She put down her cup and looked at me. “But, hon, they’re not going to be four or five easy days.”

I nodded, my headache almost obscuring the sense of her words. As though feeling it herself, Catlin fished out a bottle of Advil from the scattered contents of her purse on the floor, handed it to me. “Here,” she offered. “You’re gonna need plenty of this to get you through the next few days.”

I took them gratefully, downing three caplets with a swig of coffee. I looked up. “You’ll be here, to help me through them. Won’t you?”

She looked away, put down her coffee, got up and went to the window. “I’m not sure you would get through them with me here,” she said quietly.

I was alarmed by the resignation, the finality, in her tone. I joined her at the window; she was standing, arms folded across her chest, looking down at the street below. “All right,” I said. “I’ll do it alone. I’ll kick the stuff, then we’ll pick up where we left off, but at a saner pace, okay?”

She sighed. “Richard—you still don’t get it, do you, honey?” She looked at me sadly. “You see in me everything you can’t be, and I see in you something I can’t be. If I were a nicer person, maybe, I’d try to be more like you—but I’m not, so I let you go ahead and try to be something you’re not.”

She shook her head. “The second take didn’t print any better than the first,” she said with a cheerless smile. “What say we just burn the negative, okay, hon?”

I started to argue—wildly improvising all the reasons we should stay together, knowing they had a hollow, desperate ring to them—when the buzz of the door intercom interrupted me. Catlin turned expectantly and hurried to the intercom. “Yes?”

“A Mr. Perelli here to see you,” came the elderly doorman’s voice, made raspy by static. Across the room I twitched in response to the name, my pulse beginning to race.

“Send him up,” Catlin said. “Thank you.”

“So that’s what you were doing—” I began, but she ignored me, heading down the corridor to the bedroom. I followed her, stopping short as she took out the clothes she’d been keeping in my closet and began draping the wardrobe bags, one after another, over her arm. I was so distressed at this that I didn’t have time to worry about who was coming up on the elevator. “Catlin—can’t we work this out?”

She snatched up the last bag, fixing me with a fiery gaze. “Richard, if you keep this up, you are going to up and throw away your whole damn career,” she snapped. “I will not have that on my conscience, Richard. You understand? That far I will not go.” She hurried out of the room, down the corridor, just as the doorbell was chiming; wardrobe bags still slung over one arm, she opened the door to admit, to my great chagrin, Ray Perelli.

I retreated to a corner by the window, too ashamed by my behavior toward him to even speak. Catlin looked relieved at his presence. “Thanks for coming, Ray,” she said, then, with a rueful smile: “We really have to stop meeting like this.”

Ray regarded her with a combination of weariness, resignation, and dismay. “Last time, Catlin. Absolute last time.” Then he looked past her to the ruins of the apartment and his eyes widened. “Jesus H. Christ.”

“I warned you,” she said, slipping past him into the doorway. She handed him her set of keys, then looked across the debris of the shattered living room to me. “Take care of yourself, Richard,” she said softly. And then she was gone, and I was alone with Ray.

He stood there on the threshold for a moment, seeing the trouble I was having meeting his gaze. “You okay, man?” he asked, stepping down to cross the room.

I turned away at his approach, looked out over the Hudson. It was a bright, sunny June day, yachts and sailboats dotting the river; little wonder I hadn’t noticed before, but it felt good, seeing it now. I thought of Uncle Nick for some reason, I thought of the Merrimack and Aunt Eleanor and my parents.

“You didn’t have to come,” I said, as Ray joined me at the window. “After what I said at that party, she shouldn’t even have called you.”

“Don’t be a putz,” Ray said amiably. “I’ve been here before. I know the terrain. Who else should she have called?”

“Ray…” My voice was shaky. “I am so sorry—”

“Like I said at the time,” Ray said gently, “that wasn’t Richard. That wasn’t Richard at all.”

He had no idea how right he was. His simple, unadorned forgiveness made me want to cry—not just for what I’d said to him at the party, for the hurt I’d caused both him and Joel, but for the senseless havoc and destruction I’d wrought on Richard’s life and career. I have things I cherish in my life, too, he’d said to me. Friends. Lovers. I’m trusting you to take care of them. And this was how I repaid his trust. Not with betrayal so much as carelessness; not conscious treachery, but reckless stupidity. I hadn’t just violated the trust he’d placed in me—I’d neglected it, and somehow that seemed a thousand times worse. I wanted to cry, but couldn’t: the tears were bottled up inside me and all I could do was tremble as the first of many chills ran through me. Ray led me to a chair, and as I grappled with demons and struggled with guilt, a man who thought I was his friend went through a closet he assumed was mine, packing clothes he thought I’d earned for a trip he mistakenly believed I deserved.

*   *   *

Ray and Melissa owned a small beach house in East Hampton, Long Island; it was there that Ray took me, and it was there I spent the next week. Ray had known enough ex-users to warn me of what cocaine withdrawal would be like, but nothing he said truly prepared me for the reality of it.

After the long drive from the city, I dragged into Ray and Melissa’s guest room in late afternoon, lay down with the intention of getting a few moments’ rest—and fell immediately asleep. When I woke it was four in the morning, yet somehow I was still tired, wanted to sleep even longer. Every muscle, every bone in my body ached: a deep, throbbing ache that even three Advil did little to relieve. It was like the worst day of the worst flu I had ever had: headaches, bodyaches, chills, and night sweats. I fell in and out of a fitful sleep; my underwear, the sheets, the pillows, all were drenched with sweat. Too weak to even change the sheets, I settled for searching out dry spots and curling up atop them.

In some ways the physical parts of the withdrawal were more tolerable than the psychological ones, and I can’t be sure even now how much of my physical pain was magnified by my mental state. I wrestled with depression and anxiety, doubt and desperation. When you’re hooked, your brain starts running sneaky little mindfucks on you; you find yourself thinking, Jesus, if I could just have one line, just one line, I could handle this. Then you start thinking, if I can’t handle this without coke, how will I ever handle anything without it? You convince yourself you’ll never be able to deal with the real world without it; you tell yourself that, well, maybe you’ll be able to use it only recreationally in the future …

Dissident voices waged war inside my head—Ray told me later they were usually referred to, collectively, as the Committee—and if there had been coke anywhere in that house, I can’t say for certain I could’ve resisted the temptation. Fortunately the physical discomfort helped me ignore the harping of the Committee: most of it was just chills and a dull soreness, except for my sinuses, scraped raw by the white blade of cocaine—so chafed and inflamed, it felt sometimes as though the front of my face were going to fall off, and the only thing that relieved it, the only balm, was, of all things, Preparation H. Imagine the indignity, the humiliation of stuffing that up your nose, three, four times a day—and happy to do it, too. A quick fix to whatever delusions of grandeur the coke had given me.

Over the course of the next several days I lay in bed, or sat in a chair in the living room overlooking the surf, or hunkered down outside on the sand—arms wrapped around myself, too weak or anxious or depressed to do much of anything. Once, on the beach, Ray and Melissa had to carry me in off the sand, where I’d fallen asleep and collapsed in on myself like a spider-crab in hibernation, as my body recovered the rest that I lost when I’d been cranked up for weeks on end.

And through it all, Ray and Melissa were there: watching over me as I slept, keeping me company when I was awake, doing their best to keep me occupied—playing Scrabble with me, or bridge, watching television or movies. One night I awoke after fourteen hours of fitful sleep, suffering such chills that all I could do was lie there shivering, waiting for it to pass. Melissa must have heard me rustling about, because she knocked politely on my door and entered to find me curled in a tight little ball of pain—sweaty, chilly, bones aching. Wordlessly she came over, sat on the edge of the bed, and put her arms around me … and at last I let myself go. I wept in her arms, wept for all the mistakes I’d made and the people I’d hurt. She stayed with me for the better part of an hour, letting me know I wasn’t alone, until I finally drifted back to sleep; the last thing I remember is her putting a pillow on my chest, and my hands atop that, so I would have something, in her absence, to hold on to. And the next night, when the chills and anxiety sent me wandering restlessly through the house, it was Ray who got up, feigning insomnia himself, and sat with me as we watched a rerun of Robert Riskin’s Magic Town on Channel 2’s Late Late Show.

After four or five days, as Catlin had predicted, the aches and chills began to subside, the depression lifted, and I began to feel less like a wounded animal than a man—a foolish but very lucky man. On the fifth day—a hot, balmy summer’s day—I sat on the beach watching the sailboats, the windsurfers, the yachts and the cabin cruisers, and I decided to join them. Crazy, maybe, but the water looked enticing and irresistibly near. I was still a little achy, but not enough to prevent me from wading into the cool Atlantic. I winced a little as I made my first stiff, tentative strokes, but I kept at it and it wasn’t long before I was swimming without any apparent discomfort—my muscles actually feeling better as I swam out to the nearest buoy, then back again. It became a routine for the next several days: breakfast, then a morning swim, twenty or thirty laps to the buoy, maybe twenty yards out; then lunch, and another swim, this one just playful, diving and rolling underwater, sometimes catching a wave as it rolled in, riding its crest or being dumped onto the sandy bottom.

I’d always loved swimming; loved it ever since I was five years old, when my parents took me to the Catskills for our annual vacation and checked into a small resort with housekeeping bungalows clustered around what for me was the main attraction—a big blue swimming pool. It was there that I learned to swim from a lifeguard who coached me one morning, showing me kicks and strokes which I faithfully imitated, kept afloat by my water wings. That afternoon, when my parents took me back to the pool and the lifeguard tried to put the water wings on me again, I promptly announced, “I don’t need them. I can swim”—and as the lifeguard cautiously stayed with me in the shallow end of the pool, I proceeded to swim exactly as he’d shown me, back and forth, kicking up a monster of a spray on my trek from one side of the pool to the other. The lifeguard was stunned—“I just showed him this morning”—and my parents were pleased and proud; soon, as soon as years pass, my father was snapping photos of me frozen in midair as I leapt off the diving board to do a bellywhopper into the water.

I’d forgotten how much I enjoyed the water, the movement, the freedom of swimming. Debra and I took Paige to Weirs Beach several times each summer, but I had never recaptured the feeling I’d had as a child—until now. It helped restore me to sanity, to health, and to myself.

I’d just come in from my afternoon swim, moving up the beach to find Ray—in cut-offs and an old t-shirt—sitting on the sand, smiling. I joined him, toweling off my hair, wiping the sand and salt from between my fingers. “You looked pretty good out there,” he said. A short pause. “You feeling as good as you look?”

I nodded. “Yeah. Finally. Thanks to you and ’Lissa.”

He shook his head. “We handled the easy parts. You got through the worst on your own.”

“Which I never would,” I insisted, “if not for you.”

“Six of one,” he said. “You’ve done your share for us, too.”

I felt a jab of guilt. No: I hadn’t; Richard had. My conscience reminded me that they hadn’t been helping an old friend, they’d been helping a stranger; but along with the guilt I felt a gratitude and an affection for Ray and Melissa that I knew I would never be able to explain to them.

“So,” Ray said into the short silence. “You think you’ve finally got her out of your system?”

His words made me see Catlin again in my mind, and though I felt a certain stirring at the image of our bodies locked together in bed, it was more than outweighed by the vivid memories of pain and failure and humiliation that had followed. I looked out at the sailboats riding the horizon and smiled. “Yesterday,” I said, “I thought about something Catlin said to me. At your party; as she was lighting her cigarette. She quoted this line from Crimes of the Heart, about smoking—”

Ray nodded, recognizing the line: “‘Taking a drag off Death. What power! What exhilaration!’”

I laughed, a bit sheepishly. “I guess that’s what I was doing, all along, with Catlin: taking a drag off Death. I’d never done anything like it before. Never gotten that close to the edge. Cat—or Beth Henley—was right; it is exhilarating. Addictive.”

He looked at me soberly. “You think you’ve had your fill?”

I laughed again. “Oh, yeah,” I said, standing. “My fill, your fill, and the guy down the block’s. I’m ready to take a few drags off Life for a change.”

Unfortunately, it was not going to be that easy. At the end of the week I returned to Manhattan, and before I even called to arrange repairs to the townhouse, I rang up Joel. I was a little amazed that he even took my call, but Ronni put him on the line right off, and his first words—which I expected to be hard, and hurt—were instead muted and concerned: “Richard! You okay? You still over at Ray and Melissa’s?”

I hadn’t realized he’d known where I was. “No,” I said hesitantly. “No, I’m home. And I’m okay.”

I apologized for what I said to him the week before; he didn’t exactly wave it away, but he genuinely sounded more concerned than offended. “You were going through a bad time, with your mother passing away … people turn to strange things when they’re going through strange times.”

I felt another stab of guilt: dammit, everyone was being so bloody understanding, and it was all founded on a false assumption, a bogus mourning I never actually felt, not in the way Richard had felt it. It was at once a convenient excuse and a nagging lie; even so I grasped at it, because I had no other choice.

“Yeah,” I said. “Very strange, sometimes.”

Joel hesitated a moment before going on. “If I were you,” he said, “I’d be less concerned with what you said to me or Ray than what this has done to you professionally. Word travels fast in this town; we’ve got some rebuilding to do, you understand that?”

I girded myself for the worst. “What are they saying about me?”

A brief pause, then, with a sigh: “That you’re a user; that you’re arrogant, temperamental, abusive; that at best, you’re emotionally unstable after your Mom’s death, and if you turned to coke once in a crisis, you might do it again.” He paused again. “I’m sorry, man. You asked.”

“Of course,” I said numbly. I looked around at the ruins of the apartment, realizing that it was going to be far easier repairing the damage to the townhouse than the damage I’d done to my—to Richard’s—career. “Okay,” I said, taking a deep breath. “Where do we begin?”

We began with me writing a letter of apology to Jonathan Lawlor, Evan Hazlett, and the producers of This Way Out: not contritely asking for my job back, but a simple, sincere apology for unprofessional, uncalled-for behavior. At Joel’s urging I alluded to my mother’s death, but I felt somehow as though I were defiling her memory by invoking it and so limited myself to a vague reference to “emotional turmoil” and let it go at that.

Second step was to send me out on auditions: everything and anything that Joel could think of, even parts he knew I was wrong for, just to get my face seen, to show the casting directors and the producers around town that I was whole and well and clean. Or at least as whole and well and clean as you can impress upon them in a ten-, fifteen-minute reading. I auditioned for commercials, radio spots as well as TV; for guest shots on sitcoms; for plays that were so off-off-off-Broadway they might as well have been in Newark. Five weeks, eight hours a day, five days a week, rushing crosstown from one appointment to the next, from a casting office on Seventh Avenue to a sound studio on West 44th. I shook a thousand hands, smiled a thousand smiles: “Hello, nice to meet you,” “Hello, how are you,” and if I inadvertently said “Good to meet you” to someone with whom I—Richard—had worked with before, it became not just an innocent flub or a lapse of memory. I could see the uneasy flicker of their eyes, the wrinkle in their forehead, the worry: Is he all right? Is he still having problems? And when I didn’t get the job, I never knew whether it was my reading or my reputation which had lost it for me.

I did, at least, get something I’d lacked before: practice. Short bursts of practice, to be sure—pacing in a waiting room, going over the “sides,” then putting my all into one or two readings within the space of ten minutes or so; then off to the next one, a different script, a different character. It was like a scene workshop from college, though incredibly compressed and accelerated. But it was precisely what I needed to get my bearings, my confidence back again—exactly what I should have done when I first arrived in New York, but how was I to have known? For all the frantic rush and the numbing tedium of meeting and greeting innumerable people, I felt good: I may have started out shakily at first, but by the fifth week I knew I was delivering, I knew the readings were always solid and sometimes exceptional. I was improving steadily, going from rusty amateur to polished professional. And the best part was that I knew it—I felt it—without the illusive ego-boost of cocaine.

And in those five weeks, how many jobs did I get from—conservatively estimated—the hundred-odd auditions I went on?

One.

Un. Uno. Eins. A thirty-second radio spot for a local appliance chain. “Find more at Fillmore’s! In Brooklyn on Empire Boulevard, on Staten Island off Hylan Avenue, and in Morris Park at Atlantic and Lefferts. Fillmore’s—find more, spend less!”

Such was the extent to which my talents were being exploited. And damn it, I was beginning to believe again that I did have talent: that maybe I would never be as good as Richard, but that I might, possibly, be worthy of leading his life. And no one would hire me. Leads in plays went to actors I’d never even heard of; guest shots on TV eluded me, just as vexingly.

“Am I doing something wrong?” I asked Joel. “I try to sound interested, but not desperate; together, but not arrogant—”

“You’re coming across fine,” Joel explained. “They call me and say you’re looking good, that they hope you’ve licked your problems.” I could almost see Joel’s frustrated grimace. “They just don’t want to be the ones to bet their shows that you have.”

What could I do? I kept at it. Kept getting better, with no outlet for my improving skills. Until, early in July, I found a message from Joel on my machine: “Call me. We’ve got something to discuss.” There was a funny tone to his voice, and when I called him back he said, “Listen, I’m about to turn something down but I thought I should run it past you before I did.”

“Turn something down?” I was appalled. “Jesus, Joel, what is it? Whatever it is, I’ll do it!”

“Check your enthusiasm at the door, okay?” he said soberly. “It’s some pitzel-cocker dinner theater, some little town in Massachusetts. They’re doing a production of The Odd Couple and they want you to star. As Oscar. Three weeks, three-fifty a week.”

Dinner theater. Even I knew what that meant. With few exceptions, dinner theaters were boneyards for ex-movie and TV stars of dubious celebrity, trotted out and propped up in indifferent productions of aging, former Broadway hits. Even I knew that any actor of Richard’s caliber would never even consider doing dinner theater. Never think twice about it. A short step from that to I’ll take Richard Cochrane to block, please?

And despite this I found myself saying, “Take it. Take the offer. I’ll do it.”

Joel was aghast. “Richard, this is not even remotely a horizontal career move—this is vertical, this is decaying orbit, you get what I’m saying?”

“The way I see it,” I said, “I don’t have much of a career at the moment, so any move is a good career move.”

“You’re in a slump, man, that’s all; it doesn’t mean you just woke up and discovered you’ve turned into Jamie Farr, for Chrissakes—”

“Joel, I need to work,” I said imploringly. “I need to do something. I can’t just take meeting after meeting and not use my skills! Please, Joel? Please, will you just accept it?”

There was a long silence at the other end.

“Okay. But there’s more,” he said. “Your reputation has preceded you even to the wilds of Massachusetts.” He hesitated, as though loath to speak the next words: “They’ll pay you a per diem to foot your bills during the run, but they want the option to withhold your full salary until after you’ve finished. In the event—”

He didn’t finish, but I did: “In the event I fuck up?”

What could I do? I wanted to work—needed to work. Even if it was in Frostbite Falls, Minnesota. Even if it was dinner theater. And now this. Could I really say they were wrong, asking for such a hedge, given my recent behavior? I thought: Well, I’ve already humiliated myself to this extent; what’s one more indignity suffered along the way?

“Take it,” I said sharply. “Just take it.” I hung up, angry at myself for giving in, but knowing I’d be far angrier at myself had I not. For now, I tried to console myself with one thing: I had a job. Maybe not the best of all possible jobs, but compared to the alternative—voice-overs for Fillmore Appliances—it was practically Joe Papp.

I kept telling myself that a week later as I disembarked my train at the Amtrak station at Route 128 in Massachusetts; feeling, as I trundled down the steps and off the train, as though I had somehow regressed simply by being back in New England. Luckily I didn’t have much time to brood. I heard my name called out and caught sight of a young woman—twenty-one, twenty-two years old—with long blonde hair, making her way through a small crowd toward me. “Mr. Cochrane!” She greeted me with a shy, formal handshake: “I’m Bettina Norris. With the Wyndham Dinner Theater. I’m so pleased to meet you.” There was a bright, genuinely star-struck quality in her eyes and in her tone that disarmed me; the last time I’d seen it was my final night in New Hampshire, the clerk at the Colony Inn. She made a grab for one of my bags. “Here, let me help with that,” she said, and before I could protest we were heading down the steps of the station toward the parking lot.

“Really,” I said, “I can handle—”

“We would’ve sent a limo,” she went on, guiding us toward a battered brown and white Ford station wagon, “but I thought that was too impersonal. And,” she added with a sheepish smile, “because I saw you in House of Blue Leaves when I was in high school and I thought you were terrific.”

It was a twenty-minute drive to Wyndham, Massachusetts, a small town—not much larger than Appleton—south of Boston. Bettina, it turned out, was a lighting operator at the theater, one of a small number of nonunion crew mixed with union members. I don’t know what I expected to find—I’d always thought of dinner theater as kind of shlock commercial ventures, I suppose—but the staff I met was as professional and competent as any New York crew, though perhaps not as jaded. In New Hampshire I’d never thought of the Theater as anything but New York, Broadway, London. But for these people, this was the Theater—it was their way of being a part of it, and the fact that The Odd Couple had probably been staged a few hundred thousand times before didn’t diminish their enthusiasm. They were taking their shot at it, and none of those other productions mattered; it didn’t deter them any more than I’d been deterred, back in college, from doing Hamlet simply because a few other chaps like David Garrick, Edmund Kean, Olivier and Gielgud had taken a fly at it before me.

I saw at once how important all this was to them—not just the resident production staff, but the cast as well. I was the “star” name in the production; the rest of the company was filled out with local actors. At our first rehearsal I was impressed to learn how many of them struggled to make a career in regional theater—how many had day jobs to pay for their true love, and how others tried to make a go of it full-time, rooming in cheap apartments or co-ops with other actors. I’d always looked down on local theater as amateur, bush-league; only New York was professional, only New York—distant, unattainable New York, glimpsed jealously from my small-town exile, my mundane insurance job—only New York was real. Could I really have been that stupid and condescending … or was there some other reason I had kept away from regional groups like this back then, in my other life? The thought eluded me; I pushed it aside as rehearsals began.

Quite a difference between this read-through and my first, back in New York: the five weeks of auditioning had helped bolster my confidence, to be sure, but the truth is that I felt more on a par with these people. Most had graduated from the same kind of small, local school I had, and one had actually gone to New England College itself about five years after I graduated. They weren’t as polished or practiced as my fellows from This Way Out, but then, neither was I, was I? I didn’t feel threatened or in over my head; from the very first scene, the card game with Oscar and Vinnie and Murray and Roy and Speed, I felt at ease, I felt secure and comfortable and relaxed.

Playing Felix was Gene Symington, a local actor of some repute—a veteran of New England repertory and community theater—and when I first met him he seemed a bit nervous, uncertain, I suppose, whether or not I would try to run away with the show. In The Odd Couple either Oscar or Felix could walk away with it; both were great parts, and for a properly balanced production you needed a balanced cast—you needed Matthau and Lemmon, or Klugman and Randall—it couldn’t be lopsided, one actor stronger than the other. Gene was a good actor, but not a “name”; I guess he had a certain justifiable apprehension that because I was the “draw” in the cast, I’d steal the play away from him. But after we finished that first read-through, he came up to me at coffee break and the tenseness was gone—because he saw that I wasn’t, in fact, going to trample all over him. I suppose he thought I was holding back, trying to maintain that balance between the two characters, and he seemed both impressed and relieved.

I have to be honest: I wasn’t holding back. I wasn’t trying to balance the production. If I’d been able, who knows, maybe I would have tried to run off with the show; but as things stood, I couldn’t. Gene had the edge on me in experience; I think I had the edge on him (he said, immodestly) in talent. So despite our disparate backgrounds, we were fairly evenly matched. The rest of the cast could attribute all the noble motives to me that they wanted, but the blunt truth was I was vastly relieved to be among equals here, and not to be the runt of the litter, as I had been in New York.

Finally I began feeling what I’d remembered feeling on the stage, back in college: that sense of excitement, of energy, of fun. It was quite a rush, throwing that plate of spaghetti onto the kitchen wall, even with rehearsal props; quite a kick when a certain delivery of a certain line brought a laugh from the other actors. It was an ideal working situation for me: I could flub a line or blow a piece of business and not be worried that the rest of the cast thought I was an amateur—far from it; they seemed impressed that I wasn’t pulling any star trips, that I could shrug and say, “Well, I sure screwed that up, didn’t I?” then go on and get it right next time. And I did get it right next time, because I wasn’t terrified, as I had been in New York, of showing myself to be a poorer actor than they.

I made several friends during rehearsals—Gene, for one; Denise Hallyn, who played one of the Pigeon sisters, Cecily; Bob Fryer, who played Murray the Cop—all of us, and others from the cast, getting together for dinners, local restaurants during the week, Boston on weekends, or just hanging out around Wyndham.

And as much as I hated to admit it, Wyndham was one of the reasons I felt so comfortable and relaxed. It was, as I’ve said, not much larger than Appleton, and in many ways felt just as familiar. There was a crossroads at the center of town, a Mobil station on one side of the road, a Richmond convenience store on the other; a little farther down there was a Wendy’s, a red brick courthouse on Main Street, and an IGA market, its windows plastered with homemade posters advertising yard sales and crafts fairs and the steak and lobster dinner at the Masonic Temple that Saturday afternoon, 1:00 to 7:00 p.m., sixteen dollars a person.

All of the characteristic aspects, in short, of a small, suburban New England town; all the things that had once driven me crazy with claustrophobia, but none of which, oddly, now seemed to bother me. Perhaps because I was here as a visitor, they didn’t threaten me as they once had; perhaps because I knew this was a temporary sojourn and not an incarceration for life, I could go to the Sunday morning Swap Meet with Gene and Denise and not feel as though I’d slipped back into that other, drearier world I’d escaped after so long.

But after the Swap Meet we drove south on a lazy, aimless summer’s drive, winding our way along rural roads, and it wasn’t just novelty that drew my gaze to the landscape rolling past. There were old saltbox-type farmhouses with lean-to roofs, tucked away an acre or more behind slide-rail fences; old churches with wooden spires and clock turrets, each of them about a minute off, as though they hadn’t quite been synchronized with the present day; tranquil, sleepy little towns that all tended to look alike, and yet different if you took the time to look. I observed it all partly with the avid interest of a tourist passing through … and partly with the quiet recognition of a longtime resident, an unvoiced, almost unarticulated pride in one’s roots, one’s home.

Except this wasn’t my home anymore, and I was a tourist now. Still, it was all right, wasn’t it, to take comfort in something familiar, especially after what I’d been through the past month? Nothing wrong with that, as long as I kept my perspective—right?

The play opened in mid-July to a sold-out house. I was both startled and thrilled at the burst of applause—of recognition and welcome—that greeted me on my first entrance. I held for the applause perhaps a second or two longer than I should have—I think I can be forgiven for that—and then launched into it. It was the first time I’d been up in front of an audience in thirteen years, but at the first laugh I got from the crowd, it felt remarkably as though no time at all had passed; as though I were simply picking up where I’d left off years before.

The cast clicked as we’d clicked in rehearsals; we were in excellent form, a true ensemble. At the curtain call, the actors ran one by one from the wings up to the edge of the stage and took their bows—starting with the lowest-billed players, some of them coming onstage in tandem, and culminating with me because I was the star, the name, the draw. But as good as the swell of applause at my entrance felt, I knew I was no star, just another player—and when the cast, according to tradition, joined hands for their final bow, it felt somehow more just, more equitable.

Mixed with the satisfaction of each succeeding performance, however, I discovered a strange kind of melancholy, as well; as we slowly neared the end of our three-week run, I began to dread, more and more, that final performance. Gene, Denise, Bettina Laurel—these people had saved me, in a way; had given me safe harbor at a time I needed it most; had provided me with confidence and security in a way they could never know. And the town—Wyndham. I told myself its quiet and solitude was comforting in the way Ray’s beach house had been comforting: a breather, a refresher, a pause after stormy times. But was that all that made me sorry to leave its narrow paths and cobbled walks, its suburban monotony that seemed not so tedious, not so restrictive as it once had?

Yes. That was all it was: the contrast between the chaos of Catlin, New York, and cocaine, and this safe, restful interlude. It was exactly what I’d needed, but now it was time to move on; back to New York, back to the auditions, back to building, or rebuilding, my career.

I’d just about convinced myself of that, the next to the last night of our run; had basked in what I knew would be the penultimate curtain call, had gone back to my dressing table to take off my makeup, when I heard from behind me something even more familiar than the town and the countryside; familiar, and far more intimate.

“Richard?”

I recognized the voice at once, but dismissed it as impossible. I started to turn around in my seat, expecting to be reassured by the sight of some stranger who merely sounded familiar—but no. I turned, and saw her standing there behind me, wearing a light summer dress, smiling hesitantly at me.

It was Debra.

For an instant I thought the two worlds, Richard’s and mine, had somehow converged again; that this woman I was staring at in surprise was my wife, who’d tracked her runaway husband to this tiny dinner theater in this small suburban town and had come to reclaim him. But as I stood up—the smile on my face not betraying, I hoped, my astonishment and anxiety—I noted the tall man standing beside her, his arm around her waist, and I realized that all that was just daydream or nightmare, I wasn’t sure which.

“Hi,” she said. “You remember Mark?”

Not my Debra; the other Debra. The one who’d never given birth to Paige, never married me, never mothered Jeffrey. A different person entirely, but—Good God, so much the same, too. Her hair was styled differently, a little longer, a little more fashionably; she wore her makeup a bit differently too, and her glasses were a tad more stylish. But the face, the eyes, the body—all that was the same; impossibly, paradoxically, she was different and yet not different, another woman entirely and yet the same woman. Jesus—was this how Richard had felt, standing outside my house in Appleton, seeing my Debra?

“Mark. Of course,” I said, shaking her husband’s outstretched hand. Debra stepped up, gave me a polite hug; I tingled, strangely, at her touch. “You were terrific,” she said, separating too soon. “Great show.”

“I’m flattered,” I said. “You guys came all the way down from”—I almost said Appleton, but caught myself in time—“Concord? Just to see me?”

“Well,” Debra admitted sheepishly, “I did have some gallery business in Boston today, so we thought we’d make a weekend of it. We don’t make it down to Broadway very often, so we thought it was damned nice of you bringing Broadway up here, just for us.”

I laughed. The same Debra: same candor, same sense of humor. The humor that toward the end had seemed to me mocking and contemptuous; the candor I had never wanted to hear. But now, here, it seemed charming and sexy, the way it had when I first began falling in love with her, years and worlds ago. I was alarmed at what I was feeling now, at the stirrings inside me, the sense of loss I suddenly found there.

“If you’re not busy,” Mark said, “maybe you’d like to grab some coffee across the street?”

What could I say? “Yes,” I said, wanting it and not wanting it, “that would be nice. Let me just get myself together.” I finished removing my makeup and the three of us crossed the street to the Minuteman Cafe. If I had any remaining doubts that I was, in fact, a good actor, they were erased by that simple half-hour conversation. I smiled, I laughed, I listened to stories about their ten-year-old, Eric, as I in turn regaled them with showbiz anecdotes, most of them stolen from Ray—and it was torture, all of it. Every minute was agony, seeing her again—her and yet not-her—seeing her with this amiable stranger whom I rather liked, hearing about the child she’d had with someone else, about the life she’d forged without me. The similarities were haunting, the differences somehow enticing: the perfume she wore, the subtle but unaccustomed shade of eyeshadow, the way she held her coffee cup. God help me, I wanted her: I wanted her badly. But was it love, or loss, or merely a desire to mark this Debra as my own—to both embrace and wipe away the differences, to make her mine just out of jealousy or envy? I didn’t know. It didn’t matter. We talked, we laughed, and after we finished our coffee they had to hit the road—not to Concord, it was too late to drive all the way back to New Hampshire, but to their hotel in Boston. I thanked them for coming, shook Mark’s hand again, bussed Debra nervously on the cheek, then walked back to my own hotel, along a street that might’ve passed for Schuyler Street, back in Appleton. Back to a room where, as I lay naked in bed, I masturbated fiercely for half an hour, seeing her face, her body, remembering her scent, remembering what it felt like being inside her—except that the face kept changing, ever so slightly, and even as I came, even as I whispered her name in the dark, I could not tell which Debra I had been fantasizing; nor which woman I was longing for.

*   *   *

The final performance came and went. At the cast party we said our farewells, cried our tears, promised to stay in touch though somehow I knew we never would. I took the night train back to New York, thinking of the events of the past month: of Ray and Melissa’s care and concern; of the friends in Wyndham who had given me more than they could ever suspect; of last night, and the strange feelings developing within me.

I thought of my rage after being fired in New York and the devastation I had wreaked on my apartment. I tried to use it to frighten myself out of what I was feeling, but it didn’t work: I’d been alone in the apartment and the damage I’d done had been merely to furniture or belongings. I kept thinking about that one night with Catlin, when she had lashed out at me with those long, sharp fingernails, drawing blood, and of how I’d raised my hand to hit her … but didn’t. Even when I wanted to—even when she wanted me to—I couldn’t do it.

And now I found myself wondering: if I couldn’t do it then, to Catlin … could I ever really have done it Debra?