Heart of Glass by Wendy Lawless Page A

didn’t utter a word that afternoon except to say please and thank you. While I may have been temporarily intimidated by the bluff of my pretentious film-school classmates and the bluster of Michael’s young-turk actor friends, this was the real deal; I was convinced that if I opened my mouth to speak, he’d immediately see me as an insecure, inarticulate, silly girl.
    We drove up Friday afternoon, and a big dinner party was in progress when we arrived. Michael and I were seated separately—most of the guests were actors and directors from the ART. Some of them I recognized from my time there working as a dresser; one of them had even pinched my ass at a party once. But it had been dark backstage, so no one seemed to recognize me. That was fine. I smiled at jokes when everyone else laughed, passed the food when it reached me, and tried to remember my best table manners from childhood. Coffee, brandy, and cigars were broken out after dinner. The smell of the smoke was horrible, and I wondered absently how I’d get it out of my clothes and hair.
    When we went upstairs to our room, Michael looked at me quizzically.
    â€œWhy didn’t you say anything?” He unbuttoned his shirt and threw it on a chair in the corner. I shrugged my shoulders. He took off his pants, tossing them aside, and riffled through his shaving kit in his boxer shorts. “You just clammed up. I mean, couldn’t you find anyone to talk to, or something? You looked so . . . I dunno . . . bored.”
    â€œI didn’t have anything to say, I guess.” I chewed my nails, longing to just turn out the lights and go to sleep.
    â€œJesus, Wendy”—he looked at me and shook his head—“only children bite their nails.”
    I yanked my hand away from my mouth, instantly feeling the wave of shame I’d experienced as a little girl when my mother harshly commented on this bad habit of mine. I had started biting my nails around the age of nine and traced it back to being nervous while watching my father onstage, worried that something might happen to him. Maybe it was from the time I saw an épée scratch his cornea at a rehearsal for Hamlet when I was a kid—I would never know for sure. There didn’t seem to be a way to make me stop. My mother had threatened to take away the little emerald ring she’d bought me when I was ten; she’d also threatened a few times to chop my fingers off with a kitchen knife, even chasing me around our Park Avenue apartment once with a pair of shears while I screamed and ran from her. Clearly, none of it worked.
    Feeling like even more of a loser than I had during dinner, I quickly changed and slipped into bed, pretending to be asleep when Michael returned from the bathroom to turn off the light. I just felt sad and far away from everything—the theater glitterati at dinner and my boyfriend’s painful attempts at the dinner table to show them he wasn’t just another unemployed actor. I closed my eyes, wishing we could leave in the morning.
    The following day, we hung out with Michael’s youngerhalf brother, Tommy, in Harvard Square. A sweet kid in his early teens, he had red hair and freckles and was a little goofy in a cute way. We ate lunch at Mr. Bartley’s, a burger place with an impossibly long menu of hamburgers named after celebrities. We browsed in the shops—the Coop, the Harvard Book Store—and Michael bought Tommy a cool Velvet Underground T-shirt at Urban Outfitters. By the time five o’clock came by, I had formulated a plan, complete with alibi, to escape another evening of hanging with all the geniuses at Brustein’s. I told Michael I was going to catch up with some BU friends at a Boston bar. It was a complete lie, but even after a nice day with Tommy, I was restless and bored and still pissed at Michael for making that remark about my nail-biting.
    It was beginning to dawn on me that, sure, I was