The next four days passed in a haze of sleep, TV, pudding, and alcohol. There was a Fame marathon on, the TV show, not the movie, and I watched every episode. I felt very sad when it turned out Julie was a coke addict. I washed my laundry but never actually changed clothes. I was too cold. I was freezing. After my Wednesday bath I had put on a pair of leggings, thick socks, a long-sleeved t-shirt and a wool sweater, but I still couldn’t get warm. And because I couldn’t get warm, I decided I should just stay dressed and not bathe again. I smoked, constantly, like it was a job I’d been assigned. I smoked four packs of cigarettes and then I had to leave the house to get more, which made me very nervous. I didn’t want to drive, because I hadn’t really stopped drinking since Wednesday, so instead I took the dog and walked to town. I slept on the couch in the den, in front of the TV so I wouldn’t miss any Fame, with a space heater pointed at me. I was still cold. I changed the bandage on my hand a couple of times. It hurt like hell, and when I went looking for Advil I found Ben’s stash of medication — Valium and Klonopin, plus a few other things I didn’t recognize. Ben never talked about what he saw and did in Vietnam, but the story was written in little white pills.
To read the rest, click over to Rom-Com Rehab on Substack. As a free subscriber, you’ll get a new chapter every month, and you’ll have a week to read it before it goes behind the paywall. If you’d like the full experience — monthly chapters to read at your leisure plus access to the full archive starting from the very beginning — you can become a paid subscriber for just $5 a month (or $45 a year).
This autumn has been uniquely challenging for Jonathan and me, which sounds like something you’d say in a job interview. In actuality, this autumn has been terrifying, exhausting and (potentially ruinously) expensive. In October, a few weeks after I started a new job, Jonathan went to the emergency room with what he thought was a heart attack but turned out to be multiple pulmonary embolisms — blood clots in his lungs. He’s making a good recovery thanks to the skill and dedication of the health care providers at NYU Langone Hospital in Brooklyn, where he spent five days in the ICU. I’d like to say things are back to normal, or on the way to being so, but there’s no normal to go back to after a health scare like this. There’s just the figuring out how to live with it, the truths that need facing, the changes that need making, and the slow reclamation of the rest of our lives together. People showed up in incredibly kind ways. Other people showed us who they really are. Some of it was heartbreaking. Some of it was funny. We’ll talk about all that another time. If you’d like to see Jon’s One Minute Walking Tour video about all this, it’s HERE.
Also, I cut my hair into a pixie and am letting it go silver because honestly, l cannot spend one more moment of my one wild and precious life pretending I haven’t been going grey since I was 19.
Hope your December is joyful. Here’s to 2024, whatever it’s got in store for us.
Talking about money can be so awkward and embarrassing, particularly when you don’t have very much of it, which is why I’ve always admired the way movies and TV shows often handle the discussion of debts and paychecks — they avoid it. You’ll see someone pass a piece of paper with a number written on it to another person, or show them a computer screen, and then by their reaction you’ll gather if the number is an insult or frightening or a thrill. And you, the viewer, can imagine a figure that’s meaningful to you — how big a bill would ruin you, how big a windfall would change your life. What’s worth compromising your dreams for.
But in real life, the numbers matter, and the day I met Nate at the bank, we were $20,000 in credit card debt and had roughly $5,800 in the bank. I had a 401k through work, which amounted to another $7,000 or so. And we had a really big glass jar full of change, mostly pennies and nickels. That was the sum total of our negative net worth.
To read the rest, click over to Rom-Com Rehab on Substack. As a free subscriber, you’ll get a new chapter every month, and you’ll have a week to read it before it scoots behind the paywall.
If you’d like the full experience — monthly chapters to read at your leisure plus access to the full archive starting from the very beginning — you can become a paid subscriber for just $5 a month (or $45 a year).
Hello again. Thanks for your patience as I figured out the best way to write a blog and a novel simultaneously while working a full-time job and trying to have a rich, happy, good life.
So anyway, I got that whole blog + novel thing taken care of!
This blog will continue to be the place where I write about love, marriage, motherhood, growing older as a Gen X woman, and things you probably should not masturbate with.
Meanwhile, over on Substack, you can read my novel, Rom-Com Rehab, which I’m publishing one chapter at a time, with new chapters coming out every month. As a special bonus, I’ve added a new Prologue and a Spotify playlist you can listen to while you read (or anytime, really).
If you were previously supporting me on Patreon, thank you so much. That account has been suspended and you will not be charged any additional fees. I took the liberty of adding you to the Substack mailing list, so you should be all set.
Watch this space. More changes are on the horizon, but I promise you won’t have to subscribe to any new platforms!
Hey! How was your month? I had an eventful June. My daughter graduated high school and my parents visited for the first time since before the Covid-19 pandemic. We had a wonderful time.
This month in Chapter 4 of Rom-Com Rehab, Tabby recalls how she and Nate met and calls her mother, the indomitable Liz Cassidy.
You can read Chapter 1 here. You can read Chapters 2 and 3 here.
If you’d like to support my writing on Patreon, you can do that here (thank you!)
New chapters are released monthly. Subscribe and you’ll get them delivered straight to your inbox! (You know how to subscribe, don’t you? Just put your email in the box and blow.)
And now, back to our story. But first, our standard disclaimer: While based on some things that happened to me in real life, this is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
We didn’t run the board. Instead, I sat at my desk and made a list of all the things I needed to do, divorce-related and Nate-moving-out-related and telling-people-related, while Trish sat in my guest chair and fielded calls. She told everyone I wasn’t available to talk, that I was traveling, but that I’d ring back after the long Thanksgiving weekend. Nate called a little after 11:30am, and Trish was polite with him before handing the phone to me. She started to get up, but I gestured frantically for her to stay.
“Hello?” I said hoarsely.
“Hello,” he said. “How are you?”
“I’m fine. How are you?”
“Fine.”
There was a thick clot of silence.
I was15 and Nate was 16 when we met at an audition for a community theatre production of Anything Goes (he got cast as Moonface Martin, I was one of Reno’s Angels). We had never crossed paths before, because I lived in Bardo, a hilly, woody town in northern Westchester, and he lived about 15 miles away in Putnam County. We started talking while waiting to be called onstage to sing our 16 bars, and never stopped. Some people fit together like puzzle pieces, but that’s not how it was with Nate and me. We weren’t a yin and yang, but two yangs, or two yins, magnets with the same polarity. We had everything in common, but most of all we shared a fanatical love for the theatre and a cellular belief that anything could be risked, should be risked, because it would always turn out fine in the end. The show must go on. It simply must. There was no other option.
We were a perfect storm of raging creative energy, dramatic ego, and competitiveness. We adored each other, and how we were with each other, so clever and sparkly, so full of ideas, so theatrical. We could talk each other into anything, and in the summer of 1986, when I was 17 and he was 18, sick of being in other people’s shows, we convinced ourselves that we’d be amazing at running our own summer theatre.
I still don’t know why we thought anyone would let us do such a thing. I was about to start my senior year of high school, Nate would be leaving in the fall for his freshman year of college, and between us we had almost no experience outside of school and community theatre productions. Nevertheless, we sat down together at my typewriter and composed a letter that highlighted our qualifications, such as they were, along with the tremendous value a local theatre company added to a community. This nervy missive was sent to all the neighboring towns that didn’t already have a troupe to call their own. We received many kind rejections, and a single invitation to come have a meeting, from the town of Cameo.
That meeting is my favorite memory of the two of us, more than our wedding day, more than anything that came before or after. We met with Mark Wilco, head of Cameo’s Recreation & Conservation Department, a trim, bespectacled, relaxed guy in his mid-30s. He listened to our pitch, asked surprisingly knowledgeable questions, and then told us he wanted to back us. He loved musicals, he said, had done all the plays in high school. He’d work with us during the coming year to get us funded and set up. Nate would call in from college and I’d do the legwork in Cameo. Our premiere season would be the following summer, the summer of ‘87. Sound good? asked Mark.
Sounds great! we said.
We played it cool as we walked out of the building and around the corner, where no one could see us, and then completely lost it, hugging, jumping up and down, dancing, making up some bizarre handshake that involved rubbing our butts together. And then Nate laid a kiss on me that bent me over backward. It surprised the hell out of both of us, because while we were always flirting and teasing and making dirty jokes, snuggling up to each other, we’d never crossed the line of our friendship before.
We laughed it off, but it did make a girl think.
We ran Cameo Players from the summer of ‘87 to the summer of ‘90, and everyone in our lives got in on the act. Nate’s father played in the pit orchestra, his mom sewed costumes, and his younger brother and sister were in all the shows. My parents opened our house for rehearsals, set building, cast parties, production meetings. Our friends were all either in the cast or on the crew. My boyfriend ran our box office and performed a million acts of kindness, surprising us with late night donuts and an endless supply of coffee, racing to pick up costumes before the shop closed, hammering sets together, hanging lights. That first year we did Godspell. Then we sang, danced and bluffed our way through You’re A Good Man, Charlie Brown, Bye Bye Birdie, and Barnum. The second year, we added a straight play to our season. Nate directed me as Annie Sullivan in The Miracle Worker in ’88 and Dr. Livingstone in Agnes of God in ’89. Our final season, I directed him in Our Town. He played the Stage Manager.
Cameo Players was all consuming. It was our home, our baby, our family. It was also a battlefield, where Nate and I were constantly jockeying for position, challenging each other, vengefully knocking each other down and tenderly picking each other up. We started it as friends and by the time it was over, we didn’t know how to do anything without each other.
I missed him, that ambitious, charming, fearless boy who sat next to me in Mark Wilco’s office and spun a story of kids who could put on a show, with or without a barn. I wanted nothing more than to put this husband person on hold and call my friend, my partner, my producer — to call Nate, the real Nate, Nate who loved me, Nate whom I loved, Nate who got all my Sondheim jokes — to call him on the other line and tell him that this horrible person I was married to wanted me to meet him at the bank, and would he come with me because I didn’t want to face my terrible husband who was leaving me by myself.
“So, the bank,” he said.
“Of course. The bank. I can be there at 3. Does that work?”
“Could you do any earlier? Noon maybe?”
“Now, you mean?”
“Yes.”
I could have, of course. I could have stood up, put on my jacket, and hauled ass uptown to our bank. I also could have thrown myself off the Woodsy balcony, eight stories above Times Square, which sounded like a much better idea. “I really can’t,” I said. “But I’ll see you at 3.”
“Fine. See you then,” he said. And then he hung up. I put my head down on the desk, still gripping the phone. Trish gently extracted the receiver from my fist.
“You all right?” she asked quietly.
“Ducky,” I answered. I picked up my head and looked at her. “You know what? I need a little time by myself. I need to call my mother.”
“Let me know if I can get you anything,” she said, standing to leave. “Open or closed?” she asked from the doorway.
“Closed. Thank you so much, Trish.”
She smiled at me. “Anytime, doll.”
I slipped on my headset, dialed Liz Cassidy at her office, and spun my chair around so my back was to the fishbowl hallway window and I was facing Times Square. I propped my feet up on the air conditioning unit while I exchanged pleasantries with my mother’s secretary, and then she put me through.
“Hello, my darling girl.” This is how she always greets me.
“Hi.” I chewed off a chunk of cuticle from my left thumb, which immediately started bleeding. I wanted a cigarette desperately. “Something terrible has happened, but before I tell you what it is you have to promise me that you’ll still go on vacation.” My mother, Ben, and I had been spending Thanksgiving with the Alexanders since Nate and I announced our engagement. Some years we’d go to them, some years they’d come to our house. This year, my mother and Ben had decided to break with tradition and spend the holiday at a swanky resort on Aruba. They were scheduled to fly out early Wednesday morning and come home Monday. Nate and I had planned to stay at their house and look after their dog.
“Tabitha, I can’t possibly make such a promise until you tell me what it is.”
I walked her through it, from coming home in the rain the night before to telling Michelle, Nancy and Trish this morning. “And now I have to go meet him at the bank, and I don’t want to,” I finished in sad little warble.
“Tabitha, I need to ask you a serious question,” she said.
“Go ahead.”
“Is he gay? Tell me the truth. Did he really leave you for another man? I’ll go with you to take an HIV test.“
“Mom! What the hell? No, he’s not gay. He left me for a 24-year-old costume mistress.”
“Costume mistress? How apt. He always seemed so effeminate to me.”
“He’s just effusive.”
“He has a very high voice. I dislike that in in man.”
“Yeah. Me too.”
“You should not give him any money,” she said, getting down to business. “You should not meet him and you should not give him any money. You should leave the office right now. First go to the bank, withdraw everything from all of your accounts, close those accounts and open new ones in your name only, and then deposit the money into those accounts. Then go home, change the locks, and call a lawyer.”
“I’m not going to do that.”
“I think that’s very foolish. American Express is a good start, but you also need to call every credit card company where you have joint cards and alert them to the situation, so he can’t continue to charge anything on them.”
“We don’t have any cards together. I have cards. He has cards. We didn’t even have the American Express Card together. It was my Card and he was an authorized user on it.”
“Why would you do such a thing?”
“Because we were married?”
“Oh Tabitha.” She sounded so disappointed. “Let me ask you something. Do you have a secret account?” Before Nate and I had gotten married, my mother and my grandmother had sat me down and explained the facts of life to me. This wasn’t a sex talk, it was a financial one. And the upshot was, have your own money. Open an account in your own name, at a different bank from the one where you and your husband did your banking, and quietly build a nest egg. Because you never know.
“No,” I admitted.
She sighed. “You should put all your utilities and your lease in your name only. Make sure you change the beneficiary for your life insurance and your 401k. At least you didn’t change your name, so you don’t have to worry about your license or passport.”
“I’ll handle it, mom. I’ll handle all of it.
“I’m so sorry, Tabitha. My poor sweet girl. What a shit he is.” Maybe other mothers would have started here, with the tenderness, rather than going all field general on my ass. But other mothers didn’t spend a decade married to Carl Cassidy.
“Just promise me you’ll still go on vacation,” I implored.
“Why in the world would I do that? Of course I’m not going to do that.”
“You have to. I won’t be able to handle it if you cancel your trip and stay home so you can watch me cry. Go. I’ll be fine, I promise. I’ll volunteer at a homeless shelter or I’ll go to Elaine’s with Lily. Just, please Mom, don’t stay home.”
“Let me talk to Ben, and I’ll call you later.”
“Okay. You can tell him, but don’t tell Grandma. I want to call her myself.”
“That ought to be interesting. So now what?”
“Now I’m going to go eat a chicken potpie. And then I’m going to the bank.” Actually, I was going to go smoke until I felt dizzy, and then I was going to eat two chicken potpies.
“You know what you should do? You should have a drink. You should drink tequila.”
“Tequila?
“Yes. Doesn’t tequila seem like the kind of thing you should be drinking now? Drink some tequila. You’ll feel better.”
“Whatever you say, Mom.”
She asked me a few more questions before we hung up, about how Michelle and Nancy were taking the news (supportive, kind), if I had heard from anyone in Nate’s family, his parents, his brother or sister (no). She told me she loved me, that I was made of tough stuff, that everything was going to be fine, better than fine, she promised.
“We’ll see,” I said, and I hung up. Still, I added “Buy tequila” to my to-do list before heading downstairs for the pleasures of hazy smoke and buttery crust.
I’m happy (and a little nervous, let’s be real) to let you know that going forward, all chapters of my novel, Rom-Com Rehab, will be available here to read for free! (Or as Mel Robbins says, at zero cost.)
You can read Chapter 1 here. If you’d like to support my writing on Patreon, you can do that here (thank you!)
New chapters will be released monthly. Subscribe and you’ll get them delivered straight to your inbox! (You know how to subscribe, don’t you? Just put your email in the box and blow.)
And now, back to our story. In chapter 2, our rain-damp and disassociating heroine discovers just how incredible American Express customer service truly is, and Lily arrives with no underpants on (probably). In chapter 3, Tabby goes to work and tells us why this is not her beautiful house.
And let’s not forget our standard disclaimer: While based on some things that happened to me in real life, this is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
When Lily and I go on vacation together, or just meet people out at a bar, we tell them we’re sisters. We look enough alike that people take us at our word — dark curly hair, brown eyes, pale. I’m taller and rounder; she’s got the good hair — thick and long. Sometimes, if we’re feeling mischievous, we tell them the real truth is we’re half-sisters; we have the same father, but different mothers. And our mothers are best friends. This never, ever fails to fascinate and quietly horrify people, and we always brush it off by saying, “It was the 70s.”
That story is true, more or less.
Our mothers ARE best friends. They grew up together in the Bronx, went to school together, got married within a couple of years of each other. Lily was born in March of 1969, and I arrived two months later. I have never known a world without Lily in it. They raised us together, Elaine Kidd and Liz Cassidy, through the early years, when they were still married, through their divorces, through their single mother years. It might have gotten complicated when my mom married my stepfather, Ben, when I was 12, but luckily he realized he was marrying all of us. He’s a good guy, Ben. But he’s not the father we share.
What we share is a hole in the air, a vacuum. Lily’s dad, Scott, took off when she was two. Liz Cassidy kicked out my dad, Carl, when I was six. These are not good guys, is what we say when we talk about it. They’re still around, tangentially, occasionally. But when they left, they left casualties. They left our mothers with debt and bills to pay and girls to raise. Girls who bruised easily, who kept vigil with wide eyes to make sure no one else went away.
That’s the father we share. A two-headed, four-armed ghost, a crime scene chalk outline where someone should have been but wasn’t. We call him Scott Cassidy, or Carl Kidd, depending on our mood.
I dialed Lily from the wall phone in the kitchen. She picked up on the third ring, and when she said hello I found myself unable to speak.
“Oh my God, Tabby, what is it?” (I just want to point out here that she recognized me from my silence.)
“Nate,” I stuttered in a hoarse whisper. “Nate. He…Nate.”
“Nate. Did something happen to Nate?”
“He…”
“Tell me. What happened?”
“Met someone. He left me.”
She said nothing to that. I slid to the floor, holding the receiver, and smoked. The cat came over and settled himself in my lap. Set to purring like a motorboat.
“That cowardly, manipulative, lying asshole,” she said at last. “I will kill him. Is he there? You tell him to stay there so I can come kill him. Are you SMOKING?”
I exhaled. “No.”
“Are you lying?”
“No.”
“Are you lying?”
“Yes.”
She sighed. “I don’t imagine there’s any way I can persuade you to stop?”
“Not right now, no.”
“Stay where you are. I’m putting on shoes and a coat and I’m coming there.”
“Okay.”
“Is he still there?”
“No, he left. He left.”
“I don’t believe this. After everything he… Did he prepare a musical number to break the news? Was there a marching band? A monologue?
I coughed, “There was no band. It was vaguely reminiscent of Lear.”
“I have no idea what that means.”
“King Lear. It’s a play. By Shakespeare.”
“Oh for the fuck of shit.”
“That sums it up, I guess.” I lit a new cigarette off the old one and leaned my head back against the wall. The cat butted me with his head, then snuggled deeper into my lap. “It’s been going on a long time. She’s 24.”
“So? That’s not so much younger than we are.”
“It is, Lily,” I said, my voice scaling up an octave. “We’re almost 30. I’m just…I’m shocked there are women younger than us that our husbands can have affairs with. Aren’t we the younger women that people have affairs with?”
“I don’t have a husband, and you’re spiraling. Stop.”
“Her name is Kimberley.”
“That is a very stupid name. She probably has terrible hair, and wears acid washed jeans. I’m walking outside now.”
“How are you still talking to me?”
“I’m on my cordless phone.”
“It works outside? I want a cordless phone. I’m sitting here in the kitchen like Ma Ingalls.”
“I’m not sure how long it’ll work but I’ll keep talking until I get out of range. Ma Ingalls didn’t have a phone.”
“Eventually she did.”
“I don’t think so. Who did Ma Ingalls even have to call? I’m going to…”
“Lily?” Out of range. I had the phone in one hand and a lit cigarette in the other, and I wasn’t sure what to do with either. Eventually the phone started to make a terrible bleating noise, and I looked at it, utterly confused. Then I was standing at the kitchen sink, holding a teacup. I think I was planning to use it as an ashtray, but I couldn’t stop running my thumb over it, feeling how smooth it was, how whole and carefully made. I smashed it against the side of the sink. It was harder to break than I thought it would be, but finally it shattered.
I had a bad moment where I couldn’t find my backpack, and then I was shaking too hard to get my American Express Card out of my wallet. There were things to do, in order. A towel to wrap around my bleeding hand. A cereal bowl to use as an ashtray. Dialing the phone. Sitting down on the floor, in the safe place under the phone. The cat slid back into my lap. I wrapped an arm around him.
An automated voice asked me to key in my card number but I ignored it. After a few attempts, the automated voice passed me along, and a pleasant man’s voice said, “American Express customer service, this is Sean, how can I help you tonight?” He sounded like a cornfield, that sweet Midwestern sound.
“Hi Sean,” I said, “This is Tabitha Cassidy, and I have a problem.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. How can I help you tonight, Tabitha?”
“Uh, my husband just left me. About an hour ago. And I need to cancel his card, it’s on my account. And I need to know what he’s spent in the past few days, I need to know what he’s bought.” I negotiated contracts for a living, and to my own ears I sounded exactly the way I did at the beginning of every negotiation. It was my, “We’re gonna make this deal work out great for everyone, pal!” voice.
“I’m so sorry to hear that, Tabitha. I can help you cancel his card, that’s no problem at all. Do you have the account number?”
“Yes.”
“Go ahead and give it to me, please.”
I read him the numbers. He asked me a few more questions, to make sure I was who I said I was.
“And your husband is Nathan Alexander?” I crumpled inside, hearing his name.
“Yes.”
I heard his hands clicking away on a keyboard. “OK, Tabitha. I’ve cancelled his card and I’ve flagged the account. Now let’s have a look at the purchase history.”
My stomach flip-flopped at this. Nate had a bit of a spending habit. It went along with his small drinking habit. Sometimes when those things ran into each other, our American Express bill could be terrifying.
“Here we are,” said Sean. “I see a charge for $57.82 two nights ago at Frederico’s, and another for $100.63 at Macys. Do those sound familiar?”
“Yes. That was me.” We’d gone out to dinner, and I’d bought a new dress. “I think I’m going to throw up, Sean. Can you hang on?”
“Certainly.”
I half-crawled, half-ran for the bathroom and stuck my head in the toilet. I know no one likes to throw up, but to me it always feels like a personal defeat. I considered just staying there, in the cool quiet of the toilet, but I forced myself up and splashed cold water on my face, rinsed my mouth. My reflection looked like a PSA, all matted, frizzy hair and dripping mascara.
“Sorry,” I said when I got back to the phone.
“Are you all right?”
I was shivering and sweating, but I felt a little better. I lit a cigarette. “Yeah. I just started smoking again and I think I might not be used to it yet.”
“I’m sorry. All right, Tabitha, over the past week I see purchases at Bed, Bath and Beyond for $230.78, Astor Wine and Liquors for $50.89, and Duane Reade for $45.67. Does all of that sound right?”
New sheets. Wine and the makings for martinis. Birth control, razors, body lotion. Given the circumstances, this was the saddest, most pathetic shopping list in the history of buying things. “Yes, that sounds right.”
“And the total balance on the account is…and then he said a number so large I kind of blacked out for a second. Does that sound right?”
As always, that number made me want to curl up in the fetal position. Unfortunately, it was exactly right. It also wasn’t all of it. But at least Nate hadn’t run the balance up any higher before exiting stage left. “Yes. That’s right,” I said in a little voice.
“Is there anything else I can do for you this evening?”
“No. That’s everything. Thank you.”
“Tabitha, can I ask you, do you have someone coming to be with you tonight?”
“Pardon?”
“Is someone coming to be with you tonight? So you won’t be alone.”
“Oh. Yes. My sister is coming.”
“And she’s on the way?”
“Yes.”
“How about if I stay on the phone with you until she gets there?”
I’m still not certain if this is something they teach at American Express, or if I just stumbled upon the world’s kindest customer service rep. But this happened, nearly word for word.
“Oh, you don’t have to do that,” I said. To be honest, I was sort of horrified at the idea of him keeping me company. This was private business, this part, the part that comes after the money and the paperwork and the details.
“I’m happy to.”
“Well, if it’ll make you feel better.”
Sean took a breath and let it out. “You know, Tabitha, sometimes things can seem so dark. This is a terrible night. But in the morning, the sun will come up, and it will be a new day. Maybe not a better day, not yet. But it won’t be this night anymore. This night will be over.”
My inclination was to thank him for his kindness and hang up. Instead, I started sobbing. To the American Express guy.
“You know, Sean,” I wailed, “The thing is, I feel so stupid. I had no idea what was going on. That he, for almost two years. And this whole time I kept thinking, if I just hung in there, eventually it was going to be my turn, but it was never going to be. It was always just going to be about him and now he’s gone and I’m, and I don’t know.”
“There was someone else?”
“There was. There is. Her name is Kimberley and she makes costumes in Seattle.”
“I’m sorry. But you gotta know, that has nothing at all to do with you. That’s to do with him. And her. And honestly, you’re better off without him. Once someone cheats, you can never trust them again. A cheater cheats.”
I swallowed hard at that. “I guess. It’s not even the cheating so much. It’s just, he’s my friend, he’s been my friend for so long. I don’t know how I’m going to do anything now.”
“He doesn’t sound like a very good friend, to tell you the truth.”
“I know. He wasn’t a very good husband either, to be perfectly honest with you.”
“How long were you married?”
“Five years. But we’ve been friends since I was 15. And we’ve been together since I was 21.”
“That’s a long time.”
“That’s a VERY long time, Sean. That’s my whole 20s. All of them. My 20s are gone. Gone.”
“How old are you now?”
“29. I am 29 years old.”
“And when will you be 30?”
“May. May of next year.”
“See? Your 20s aren’t gone. You’ve still got, what, five months of 20s left.”
I chuckled, in spite of my weepiness. And even as I was bemoaning the end of my twenties I was conscious of how much I sounded like Sally Albright in When Harry Met Sally, panicking that she’s going to turn 40…in eight years. Nate would have gotten that reference, without my ever having to explain it. “Are you trying to be helpful, Sean? Because that’s not helpful. If you’re trying to be helpful, be the opposite of what you’re doing right now.”
“You’re going to get through this, Tabitha. You will.”
“You don’t even know me,” I protested.
“Here’s what I know. I know you have a sister who loves you enough to come be with you. I know you have sense enough to call and check on your credit card when most people would be curled up in a ball on the floor.”
I took a drag off my cigarette and looked around. “I actually am on the floor,” I admitted.
“Are you curled in a ball?”
“No. I’m sitting.”
“That’s not anything. Lots of people sit on the floor.”
A moment of quiet passed between us. “Smoking is really bad for you,” Sean said.
“Wait, what? I had not heard that.” I took another drag and blew it out loudly. “Sean, did you ever watch Little House on the Prairie?”
“My sisters did.”
“Ma Ingalls had a phone, right? In the later seasons.”
“Let me think,” he said. “Well, a line gets set up in town. And Mrs. Oleson runs the switchboard and listens to all the conversations.”
“Yes. That’s right.” For half a second I was convinced I would marry Sean someday. That I would track him down in whatever state he was talking to me from, and he would be tall and blond and pink cheeked, with big hands, and we would live in a farmhouse and have four kids, three sons and a baby daughter, and I would have a garden and my tomatoes would win some kind of tomato prize at a fair.
The buzzer rang then. “Sean, hang on, my sister is here.” I let the phone drop, stubbed out my cigarette. I pushed the button to open the front door downstairs, and pulled my door open. “Lily?” I called.
“I’m here! I’m here!” she yelled back as she ran up the stairs. She came around the curve in the hall and I catapulted myself into her arms. She caught me.
“I know, I know,” she said, hugging me tightly. I started sobbing again. She rocked me back and forth, kept saying “I know,” over and over, until she was nearly singing it. I stepped back from her, wiped my running eyes and nose with my coat sleeve. “I have to hang up with American Express,” I said, and turned back into the apartment.
“Why are you talking to American Express?”
I pulled the receiver up by the cord. “Sean? Are you still there?”
“I’m still here, Tabitha.”
“My sister is here, so I’m going to hang up now. Thanks for talking to me while I waited.”
“Tabitha, before you hang up, would you put your sister on the phone?”
“Really?”
“Humor me, would you?”
“Okay,” I held the phone out to Lily, then changed my mind and put it back to my ear. “Sean?”
“Yes?”
“Thank you.”
“You hang in there, Tabitha.”
“We’ll see,” I said, and then tried to hand Lily the phone again.
“What?” she asked.
“American Express wants to talk to you.”
“Why?”
I shook the phone at her, “Just talk to American Express.”
She took the phone from me. I lit a cigarette and she glared. I rolled my eyes at her. She’s a marathon runner. She’s such a pain in the ass about things like smoking. And ice cream. And French fries. And pie.
“Hello?” she said. “Yes, this is Tabitha’s sister. Hi, Sean, I’m Lily. I’m really here. What’s going on exactly? Well, that was very kind of you. Yes, it is. Did you hear about the girlfriend? Kimberley. I know, the smoking. I will. OK, thank you. You too, Sean.”
“What was that?” she asked, handing the phone back to me and slipping off her coat.
“I don’t know. I guess he wanted to make sure I didn’t kill myself until I paid my bill in full.” I looked at her then, closely. “Lily, what the hell are you wearing?” She looked down at herself. “Clothes,” she said. “This is what I had on.” She was dressed in pink thermal bottoms, a white wife beater, an oversized flannel shirt, and duck shoes. Her hair was in a Pebbles Flintstone ponytail.
“Did you really just put on shoes and a coat and walk out of the house?”
“Yes.”
“Did you bring clothes for tomorrow?”
“No. What’s tomorrow?”
“Work?”
“We’re not going to work tomorrow.”
“We’re not?”
“Of course not! Your husband just left you. I think you can take the day off.”
“I’m planning to go to work.”
“Let’s talk about it in the morning. Why are you wearing your coat?”
“What?” I looked down at myself, confused. “I don’t know.”
“Why are you holding a towel?”
“I broke a cup,” I said, putting my hand behind me. She looked from my hand to my face and back again, and then held her own hands out to me.
“Let me see,“ she said. I hesitated, and then put my wrapped hand in hers. She opened the towel and breathed in sharply when she saw the blood, and asked what I’d done to myself. I shook my head, I honestly wasn’t certain what had happened. We didn’t talk for a while then, as she unbuttoned my coat, slipped it off my shoulders, washed my hand and pulled a few cup shards out of my palm. She rewrapped my hand in a clean towel and told me to go sit. When I didn’t move, she led me to the couch, sort of folded me into it. “I think you’re in shock,” she said, as she tucked a couple of blankets around me.
“No, I’m fine,” I answered. My teeth were chattering, and I felt like I was about to have diarrhea. “I’m fine,” I said.
“Right,” she said. “Just stay there for a minute?” She walked into the bedroom and came back carrying Harold. He liked to hang out in there, with his front paws tucked under the radiator. “Here,” she said, draping him across my lap. “I’m going to make tea. Do you want anything to eat?”
“No. I don’t want tea.”
“That’s fine.”
She went into the kitchen. I stared at nothing. I stroked the cat. I shivered. I chattered. I closed my eyes and shrank into my blankets. Time passed. It could have been 100 years. Probably it was closer to 10 minutes.
“Tabby?”
I opened my eyes. Lily was standing there holding a tray with two mugs and a plate of cookies. “Yes?”
She put the tray down and held a mug out to me. I looked at it. “Take it,” she instructed. I accepted it from her and she curled up next to me on the couch.
“Now drink it,” she said. “I put in a lot of honey, and cream. It’s delicious.”
I took a sip. It tasted like nothing. “Thank you,” I said. I held the cup and dangled the tea bag. “Where’d you get the tray?” I asked.
“From the cabinet over the refrigerator.”
“I have a serving tray?”
“Yes. And many platters. Have a cookie.”
“What kind are these?” I asked, taking one from the plate she held out.
“Peanut butter chocolate chip.” They were delicious, gooey and fresh. Lily doesn’t sleep much, or well, and she fills her nights with baking. She’d hadn’t put on a bra or thought to bring a toothbrush, but she’d had the presence of mind to pack a Tupperware of cookies. Because she has her priorities straight. When my mug was empty she took it from me and set it alongside her own on the old piano bench Nate and I used as coffee table.
“Okay,” she said. “Tell me everything.”
Someone once said there are three versions to every story – yours, the other guy’s, and the truth. I tried to tell the truth. I knew I was going to have to tell this story many times in the coming days, and I was already thinking of what that would sound like, what I’d leave in, what I’d keep secret. But that night, I told Lily every shameful scrap of what really happened between me and Nate. What he’d demanded from me, what I gave away, to keep us together. My loneliness. His anger. Everything we’d never forgiven each other for. The ways I’d found to avoid having him touch me. I felt wrung out when I was done, and I put my head in her lap and closed my eyes.
“Can I ask you something?” Lily said into the quiet.
“Sure.”
“Are you absolutely certain Nate isn’t actually gay?”
I started laughing, flopped over so I could look up at her. We’d had this conversation before. I’d had this conversation with many people over the years. He truly wasn’t. “No, Lily,” I said, wiping my eyes, “For the millionth time.”
“Are you sure? Because he always seemed really gay to me.”
“He’s emotionally expressive. He likes musicals. He was a theatre major. That doesn’t make him gay.”
We listened to the rain against the windows, and the wind.
“Didn’t he used to dress up like a Dreamgirl?”
“Yes, but that was just for coming out parties at college. Lots of men dress up as women for shows. It doesn’t make them gay.”
“Explain this to me again.”
“It’s just, a lot of guys are in the closet at home, and then when they get to school, they feel safe enough to come out. So Nate and some of his friends made up this thing where they’d throw a coming out party for guys who were new to being openly gay, and they’d dress up like the Dreamgirls and sing for them. It was sweet.”
“Why didn’t they sing I’m Coming Out?”
“Because the guys who were coming out sang that at the end of the party.”
She stroked my hair. I closed my eyes.
“I need to call Liz Cassidy,” I said.
“Tomorrow. You can call her tomorrow.”
I dreaded making this call. My mother and Ben had thrown Nate and me an elaborate wedding at a country inn, which I’d obsessively modeled after Father of the Bride, right down to the white fairy lights in the bushes and my ornate headband. On my wedding day, moments before I walked down the aisle, Ben had grabbed me by the shoulders, looked into my eyes, and said, “You don’t need to do this. I will take you out of here right now, and your mother will make excuses, and it will be fine. You don’t have to do this if you don’t want to. I’ll take you home right now if that’s what you want.” I’d been shocked and laughed at him, called him a nervous father. He and my mother walked me down the aisle, and when the officiant asked who was giving me away, he said, “She gives herself, with her parents’ blessing,” but he was squeezing my hand so tightly, I thought he’d break it.
“Will you tell Elaine Kidd?” I asked.
“Yes, I’ll tell her.”
“She’s going to be upset.”
“I’ll handle it.” Lily’s mother was my “other mother,” as Liz Cassidy was Lily’s. During the years Liz and Elaine had been single, we’d functioned as a little family of four, sort of like the TV show Kate & Allie, except we never lived together and we didn’t have Chip. Elaine Kidd was delicately beautiful, soft-spoken, and cannily resourceful. She worked as a concierge at the Waldorf Astoria in New York. No one could say no to that sweet, modulated voice and flower-like presence. But Elaine was also sort of fragile. She wounded easily, often descending into melancholy. She’d had a string of troubled relationships after Lily’s father left, but had never remarried.
“I wish he was gay,” I said sadly.
“Why?”
“Because if he was gay, then I could just say, ‘Oh, you’re gay! That’s awesome! We can still be friends, we can still work together. I’d like to meet your new gay lover!”
“You’d probably be really good friends with his gay lover. The three of you could have brunch.”
“But this way,” I went on, “I can’t have him in my life. How can I possibly do that?” I sat up and looked at her. “I have no idea what to do now. What do I do?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t think you have to know tonight. I think tonight, it’ll just be enough to wake up tomorrow.” She got up.
“Where are you going?”
“To get your cigarettes,” she said over her shoulder as she walked into the kitchen. She came back with all three packs, the lighter, and the cereal bowl. She sat back down, retucked my blankets, lit a cigarette and handed it to me. I inhaled gratefully.
“Actually, for tonight, I think you just need to smoke,” she said.
“Well, if you insist,” I said. She leaned back into the couch and said nothing as I chain-smoked three cigarettes.
“Tabby, can I tell you something?” she said when I set the ashtray aside. I nodded. “I never liked him,” she said.
“Oh, yes you did.”
“No. I really didn’t. He always seemed so…acting!” She waved her arms around over her head. “Always performing. And he was so enamored of himself. He loved himself so much. He loved himself the way he was supposed to love you.”
“He loved me,” I said. He’d been gone just a couple of hours, and we were already talking about him in the past tense. Neither one of us noticed how easily we’d made the transition.
“I know, just…not enough,” she said.
I shook my head at her, chuckling darkly. We’d had this conversation too, or a version of it, so many times, since we were small. “What’s enough, Lily? What’s ever enough?”
She smiled at me, that sad smile of hers. “Nothing.”
“Nothing,” I agreed.
I stretched out and put my head back into her lap. “I don’t want to get into bed.”
“Okay,” she said.
“I mean at all. Ever. I think I need to get rid of that bed and buy a new one.”
“I’ll help you do that. We can do that tomorrow.”
“Sheets too. Everything.”
“Whatever you want.”
“I’m so tired.”
“I know. Why don’t you just close your eyes, and you sleep.”
“What’ll you do?”
“I’ll watch TV.”
I thought she’d make me go to bed, at some dark hour. Or that she’d make sure I was tucked into the couch and crawl into bed herself. But that’s not what happened. She sat up and channel surfed, from primetime to Letterman to late night to the early morning news, while I slept fitfully with my head in her lap, the cat curled behind my knees, all night long, that night he left.
I did go to work the next morning, because I couldn’t think of what else to do, and the idea of sitting in the house with all his things — his clothes in the closet and his books on the shelves, cups he’d sipped from in the cabinets and the towel he’d used the morning before — it all seemed unbearable. Lily insisted on escorting me to work before heading back to her place on the Upper East Side to get some sleep, and I protested this hotly, insisting I was capable of riding the F train on my own, but was secretly glad she did. I felt fragile, breakable, and not entirely like I was inhabiting my body. It was as if I was hovering a foot or so over my own head, observing my actions and my feelings, narrating as I went, “Oh look, the very sad woman is putting on pants. Now she’s drinking coffee and smoking another cigarette. That mascara she’s putting on probably isn’t a very good idea.”
I went to work because I had friends there, and hard phone calls I needed to make, and I was a little afraid to be alone in the apartment when I made them. I had a strong sense that if I stopped moving, if I let myself think, I would die. I would turn to sand and blow away, or lie down somewhere and not get up. I knew I wasn’t really in this yet, wasn’t actually feeling it, and I was certain no one could be expected to feel whatever it was I was going to have to feel eventually and survive it. Also, it was chicken potpie day in the company cafeteria, and no way was I missing that.
On paper, I had it made, career-wise. I worked for a children’s cable channel called Kaleidoscope, which was part of the Music Inc. network — home to the famous music video channel Music Inc., the slightly less famous music video channel Radio-Broadcast, and a channel devoted to classic television called BunnyEars. My first day on the job, in the fall of 1994, Sheryl Crow played our company cafeteria. Because why not? Because All I Wanna Do was everywhere. Because our cafeteria, styled after a hunting lodge and officially named Woodsy, was so unique and beautiful it got written up in Vanity Fair as a hot spot for lunch in Manhattan, if you could get in, which was impossible unless you knew someone who worked there. Because we were the lucky ones, working for this company that felt like family, where music was everywhere and people had serious opinions about sitcoms from the 50s and 60s, where the news was reported by bright, beautiful twentysomethings, and we all had perfect hair knots and choker collar necklaces.
I hated my job. That’s not exactly right. I loved a lot about it. I loved my office, which was on the 15th floor of a glass skyscraper on the corner of Broadway and 44th Street and overlooked Times Square. (I would stand on my window ledge and peer down at the crowds, and I had a small pair of binoculars I used to spy on people in the hotel across Broadway.) I loved my paycheck, which was steady and substantial. I loved my annual bonus. I loved my boss, Michelle, who was wise and generous and excellent at what she did, and who treated me like a friend while she taught me everything she knew. I really loved my assistant, a petite spitfire named Trish, who was so gorgeous men would stop in the street to talk to her, and so bright and intuitive she was usually three steps ahead of me.
But the job itself, the work I did all day, was nothing I had trained for, or wanted. My whole career was an accident, something I had stumbled into and got stuck in, like the world’s most alluring tar pit. I was a contract negotiator in the Business and Legal Affairs department, which meant I spent my days arguing over money and perks and logistics, and then writing contracts based off templated language. I wheeled and dealed all day – dozens of contracts, for acquiring programming, staffing and casting series in development and production, and creating online content for the nascent digital group. Most of the contracts I negotiated were for actors and voice over artists, but I also handled animators, puppeteers, writers, composers, directors, and once, notably, a dog. He was a Chocolate Lab named Cook, and it took days to finalize his contract rider, which specified what kind of bottled water, treats, and chew toys he needed on set, along with a list of requirements for his owner and handler. He was a very nice dog, even if he had a taste for Evian.
I had a telephone headset (I thought it made me look like Madonna, but the first time Lily saw me in it she called me Tabitha from Time Life) and an entire wall of my office was filled with tacked up index cards, each one representing a deal in progress. Every morning, Trish would come sit in my guest chair, and we’d run the board — go through each deal and make notes on how the negotiation was progressing, what still needed to be sorted, if we’d gotten additional information from our supervising attorney or the show producer. And then we’d start rolling calls, me pacing around the office, tossing a tennis ball from one hand to the other, Trish listening in while on mute, making notes, lining up the next call. In the afternoons there would be meetings, with other members of the legal team, with the lawyers who were our bosses, with the series development department and the channel marketing department, with scheduling and the cheerful online group.
I had no business doing any of this. I was the furthest thing from a lawyer you could imagine. I’d come to New York with a B.A. in theatre from Ursidae College, a small liberal arts school near Rochester, NY. I also had a minor in Religious Studies, which my mother joked, not unkindly, was my back-up plan, in case a career in the theatre didn’t work out.
My first job out of college was at an independent casting office, where we would cast plays for regional theatres all over America. After a year and change of casting for the regionals, I got a huge opportunity to move to New York Stages, which was one of the most highly regarded off-Broadway theatres in the city. I’d directed plays — in college and at the summer theatre Nate and I had run together — that had premiered at NYS. When I went for my interview I walked the halls and gently touched the original cast photos of the shows I’d done — Lee Blessing’s Eleemosynary,Frankie and Johnny in the Claire de Lune by Terrence McNally, Danny and the Deep Blue Sea by John Patrick Shanley, John Pielmeier’s Agnes of God. I actually got a little choked up during my interview, so moved was I to be there, in the closest thing to temple or church I’d ever known. I loved everything about NYS, the beautiful work they did, and how seriously they took it. It felt exactly the way a theatre should — a little down-at-heel, but shimmering with energy and creativity. I loved also the fact that NYS had a woman artistic director, and she and the executive producer, a man, were the best of friends. Nate and I had dreamed of having a shop like NYS someday, and when they hired me as their casting assistant we celebrated like we’d won the lottery, a Tony Award and an Oscar, plus inherited a rent-controlled classic six apartment in Manhattan, all on the same day.
The problem was money. We had none. None. We were actually operating at a deficit, which we filled with credit cards and faith that things could only get better. I was making $18,000 as a casting assistant, and Nate was making $17,000 plus commission as a junior talent agent for a small agency. Granted, it was the early 90s, but there were weeks when we had to choose between doing our laundry or eating. Things came to a crisis point when I’d been at NYS for about a year and a half. It was payday, and for some reason payroll had been delayed. Without my paycheck, I found myself unable to get home. I had to borrow money from petty cash to pay for my subway token back to Brooklyn, and one to bring me back to work the next day.
Nate and I had one of our worst fights that night, a real screamer. Round 1: all our wedding gift money was gone and we were still somehow in debt and broke. Round 2: someone had to get a real job, that was clear, the kind of job where your salary was more than your age. Neither one of us wanted to be that person. We both had dreams, of saying something meaningful, of being the kind of person who stuck it out and made it, made a life in the theatre. Round 3: I still had dreams of graduate school, of studying directing at Yale or Northwestern or Carnegie Mellon. If I was headed off to grad school anyway, Nate said, I should be the one to find the real job, since I’d be quitting within a year or so.
It was hard to argue with that. But then, it was always hard for me to argue with him. Fight, yes. Scream and carry on and flail about, sure. We were ace flailers. But to really argue, to make myself heard, to ever win the point? I never managed that. It always felt like he’d let me yell myself out and then we’d end up doing what he wanted anyway.
I called my friend Alix, whom I’d met at my first casting job. She was sitting pretty at Kaleidoscope, working in Rights & Clearances, a specialized part of the Business and Legal Affairs department wholly devoted to getting permission to use content with underlying rights, like songs and clips from shows. Over a tearful lunch I explained my problem, the lack of money, the fighting, Nate’s refusal to be the real job person. She brushed off my concerns with a wave of her hand. They were handing out jobs at Music Inc., she said. All I had to do was show up. And show up I did, in a little skirt suit I’d purchased at Ann Taylor just for the occasion. Despite my being completely overdressed and having almost no idea how to operate a computer, they took Alix’s word for it that I was smart and funny and cool and loved music, and they eventually hired me as the assistant to a manager in the Business and Legal Affairs department named Robert. He was extremely kind, and when he hired me he asked how much I wanted to make. I told him I wanted to make one more than my age: $26,000.
No problem, was what he said. I found out, years later, I’d sold myself short by almost twenty thousand dollars.
But still, I was happy, sort of. I felt like a Rockefeller, with my new salary and my shiny health insurance folders, my 401K and pension eligibility. And there was no denying the fact that I was hanging with the cool kids now — I was part of the first Music Inc. generation, and there was an undeniable cachet to working there. And it was only for a year or so, I was certain, just long enough to chip away at our debt while I got my grad school applications in order.
I turned out to have a knack for the job. I was a natural at the sort of detached, single-minded persistence that makes for good negotiation, and the linear precision of drafting contracts appealed to the part of me that craved order. Every year I swore this was the year I was applying to grad school, and every year I got a raise, and a promotion, and then an office, and then an assistant, and a bigger bonus. Suddenly it was four years later, and I was negotiating dozens of deals at a time, some of them for big money, some of them kind of high profile. It was a rush, in a way, going head to head with charming agents and slick entertainment lawyers, beating them at their own game. But when I stopped to think about it, I felt a queasy sense of time passing while I wasn’t any closer to anything I’d planned on being, which at various times had included actress, director, artistic director of a theatre, and professor (the subject varied from theatre to literature to religious studies). My temporary job had become my career, and I was still casting about, trying to figure out what I wanted to be when I grew up. Mostly what I wanted to do was float in the bathtub and read, but they weren’t hiring for that job.
The morning after Nate left I skipped my usual stop at the Star Lite Deli, where I’d been getting breakfast for four years, and instead took up a position with the smokers in front of my office building on the corner of 44th and Broadway. I recognized a few people, and they gave me a nod of solidarity but said nothing, which suited me fine. I smoked three cigarettes in a row and then forced myself to go upstairs. My first stop was Woodsy, where I grabbed an extra-large coffee with cream and a muffin the size of baseball, and then I went directly to Michelle’s office on the 14th floor.
Michelle had been my boss since my first promotion, from Assistant to Coordinator, three years before. That first promotion was the most exciting, because it meant I wasn’t anyone’s errand girl anymore. I was still sitting in a cubicle in the hallway, but my days of answering phones and filing were behind me. She was a tall, elegant woman, with an easy smile and a gentle way about her, beautiful manners and a wonderful laugh. Which is why no one who had to go head-to-head with her in a negotiation ever saw her coming, a mistake they regretted when she sliced them open, delicately plucked what she wanted from them, and left them for dead. She was a killer, a cold-blooded shark who could make anyone do anything just by talking to them in that sweet, slow voice of hers. Once they knew her, she scared people to death.
I presented myself at her office door, coffee in one hand, muffin in the other, windblown, nicotine high and just on the edge of hysterical. She was at her desk reading the NY Times.
“Michelle?” I could hear the shakiness in my voice and I hated myself for it. I desperately wanted to keep it together, to be calm and collected the way I imagined she would be. In three years of working beside her I never saw Michelle lose her cool, not once, not even when she was planning her wedding, negotiating contracts for Hootie & the Blowfish, Green Day, and Hanson to appear at the Kaleidoscope Awards, and buying a house, all at the same time.
“Good morning,” she said, lowering the paper far enough to look at me. She tilted her head to the side and her perfect brows drew together. “My goodness, Tabby,” she said in that smooth voice, “What’s the matter?”
I burst into tears (so much for that mascara), and she was on her feet and across the room to me in a few graceful steps. “No, no, no,” she said quietly, reaching to close her office door behind me. Our offices were fishbowls, with large windows looking out onto the hallway where a wall might otherwise be. She positioned herself in front of me and kept my back to the window wall. “Listen to me,” she said quietly, “Whatever it is, we’ll fix it. But you cannot cry here. We don’t cry in the office.”
I nodded my head vigorously. “I know,” I said. Crying meant you were weak, that you couldn’t handle yourself. Crying meant they might want to think about replacing you with a lawyer, or a man at the very least, someone tough. We didn’t cry, not here, not ever. If you needed to cry you took it outside the building. She was always paraphrasing A League of Their Own: “There’s no crying in children’s television! There’s NO CRYING in children’s television!”
“Out with it,” she said. “Did you screw something up?” Things got screwed up all the time. You’d miss a deadline or forget to include a vital clause in your deal, you’d make a verbal agreement over drinks with an agent who would claim to have no idea what you were talking about when you sent the contracts over the next day. Part of our job was to not screw things up, of course, but even more importantly, to fix them quietly when we did.
I took a deep breath, tried to steady myself. “No. No I didn’t screw anything up. Nate left last night. He left me. For someone else.”
She looked confused for a moment, and then she gave me a look of such sadness, such compassion, that I could feel myself tearing up again. “Oh no,” she said. “Oh Tabby, that’s terrible. Come sit down.” She led me to her guest chair and settled herself back behind her desk. She looked at me thoughtfully. “You can cry if you want,” she declared. Instead I laughed, because if Michelle was giving me permission to cry in the office, I was truly fucked indeed.
I unwrapped my muffin and sipped my coffee, “I got home last night and he was sitting on our deck in the rain…” I began,
“Wait,” she said holding up a palm. “I’m going to call Trish and Nancy, so you only have to tell this once.” Trish was also Michelle’s assistant; Nancy was Michelle’s boss. She was actually the big boss, the general counsel of Kaleidoscope, and supervised all of the attorneys and contract negotiators. We were close, all of us, not friends exactly — we didn’t hang out on the weekends or call each other to chat — more like an excellent all-girl professional volleyball team.
I nibbled at my muffin and drank my coffee while Michelle called them and asked them to come to her office. They arrived together.
“Hey gals,” said Nancy, letting herself and Trish in.
“Close the door,” said Michelle.
“Uh oh,” said Trish, taking the other guest chair. She looked from me, to Michelle, to Nancy. “What’s happening?”
“Tabitha has something to tell us,” said Michelle.
“Oh no. You’re not quitting, are you?” Nancy asked.
“No, no, of course not,” I answered, and then I launched into my story — finding Nate on the patio in the rain, the girlfriend, how he packed a bag and left, the world’s kindest customer service representative, Lily coming to stay with me. I knew I’d have to tell this at least twice more today, once to my mother and once to my grandmother. “And so that’s that,” I finished lamely. I balled up my muffin bag and threw it and my coffee cup into Michelle’s trashcan. “That’s that. I just wanted you to know what’s happening.” They were all happily married, Nancy for many years, Michelle for a couple, Trish a newlywed. I looked around at them, at their pained faces. “Lighten up, Francis,” I said. “It’ll be fine.”
“Of course it will,” said Michelle.
“Absolutely,” Nancy agreed.
Trish put a cool, beautifully manicured hand on my arm. She was so tiny, so perfect, I always felt like some kind of hulking hobbit next to her. I wanted to hide my own hands, with their bitten nails and picked over cuticles. “You tell me what you need,” she said quietly. “Whatever it is, you just tell me.”
I thought about it, what I might need. “Let’s go run the board,” I said. “And act like everything’s normal.”
“Let’s do that,” she agreed, and we left Michelle’s office together.
Last month, I started posting my novel, Rom-Com Rehab, a chapter at a time on Patreon (hello and thank you to my patrons!) April is my birthday month, so I’ve decided to post chapter 1 here as a present for you. If you enjoy it, head over to Patreon to read chapter 2!
Before we head off to a terrible rainy night in Brooklyn, a disclaimer: While based on some things that happened to me in real life, this is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Everybody’s a dreamer Everybody’s a star Everybody’s in show biz It doesn’t matter who you are. ~Celluloid Heroes, The Kinks
We were young together. ~As If We Never Said Goodbye, Andrew Lloyd Webber
Rom-Com Rehab, Chapter 1
Nate’s favorite things were Neil Simon plays, Richard Dreyfuss movies, musical theatre, and The Beatles. His passions were writ large, and for a long time, my favorite thing about him was his sense of theatre, the way he carried himself though the world as if a production number might break out at any moment. I reveled in the Technicolor of all his feelings. He lived his whole life like he was emoting to the cheap seats.
In other words, he could be a real goddamned drama queen.
So I wasn’t immediately alarmed, that November night just before Thanksgiving in 1998, when I found him sitting on our uncovered patio in a driving thunderstorm, crying. No umbrella, no raincoat, just sitting in a white plastic chair, his jeans and sweatshirt drenched, his nose running and his dark curly hair a matted mess, lightening flashing in the distance.
He’d just come back from three months on the road. He was working as a tour manager for traveling theatre companies then, a job that kept him away most of the time. He’d return to our floor-through in Brooklyn for a few weeks between gigs, to sleep and do laundry and decompress, and then he’d be back out there, shepherding African dancers or Jellicle cats from theatre to theatre across America.
We told ourselves and each other he was doing it for the money, that if any couple could easily sail through so much time apart, it was the two of us. I was a night owl and a loner, never happier then when I could stay up until the small hours of the morning, reading in bed. He was a happy-go-lucky wanderer, content to live out of suitcases, collecting friends and refrigerator magnets from all the cities he visited. And it was just for a few years, long enough to pay off our credit card debt and put some money in the bank. That’s what we told ourselves and each other. What we said when he left on his first tour, almost two years before. What we said when days would pass between phone calls or emails, and it hardly seemed to matter. What we said when the time apart started to feel more comfortable, easier, than the time together.
The apartment was dark when I got home that night, the porch door slamming open and shut in the wind. “Nate?” I called, standing in the entryway, clutching my inside-out umbrella in one hand and my leather backpack in the other, rain dripping a puddle onto the old wood floor. “Nate are you here?” I hesitated. Had we been robbed? Was he home? Was there someone waiting in the apartment to attack me? I had this thing about checking the shower and the closets when I got home, that went all the way back to elementary school — walk in the house, keep on my coat and shoes, check the shower, check the closets, make sure no one was there, and then, milk and cookies.
“I’m home!” I yelled, dropping my things to the floor and lacing my keys into my fist, like metal claws. “I am walking to the porch door now! I am holding my keys like a weapon and I am not afraid to gouge you in the face with them!”
I’d learned that particular piece of badassery from a self-defense course I’d taken in college. I’d directed William Mastrosimone’s Extremities my sophomore year, a play in which a woman named Marjorie fights off and then imprisons and tortures a would-be rapist who walks into her house one day. For months I completely immersed myself in personal narratives of rape, rape culture, the psychology of fear, the physical experience of rape, and the way rape victims are processed through and treated by the legal system. I also got a black eye and a cracked rib teaching my actors their fight choreography. I spent a lot of time crying in my advisor’s office that semester. The world felt so unsafe, and I felt so small in it. So after the show closed, I sought out a place where I could safely beat the hell out of a well-padded make-believe attacker.
I clenched my fingers around my keys, took a deep breath, and propelled myself across the kitchen to the porch door. But there was no intruder. Just Nate, head in his hands, looking utterly defeated.
It’s not kind, and I’m not terribly proud of this, but I was extremely annoyed.
“Nate? Nate, what is it?” I went to him and knelt down, the wind blowing my hair into my face and the rain pelting us. I tried to pull his hands from his face, but he jerked away from me and kept crying.
“What’s happened? What is it?” I untangled my keys and wrapped my hands around his wrists. He shook his head from side to side and sobbed, until he raised his head from his hands and looked me in the face.
“Tabitha,” he croaked, and then leaned forward to grab at me. I let him hold me, wrapped my arms around him as best I could.
“What is it? Tell me. What’s happened? It’ll be okay,” I said. I was starting to feel prickles of genuine concern. I’d grown accustomed to Nate’s alternating performances of exuberance and wretchedness, but this felt different. This felt real.
He leaned back, and with a look of broken sadness on his face, told me he wanted a divorce.
The funny thing? I was relieved. I’d thought he was going to tell me one of our parents had died. A car crash. A heart attack. A fall on ice and a cracked head. But a divorce? A divorce I could work with. I’d been talking him down from ledges forever. During his senior year of high school, Nate’s girlfriend, Sharon, broke up with him, and he convinced his high school’s marching band to assemble on her lawn and play My Sharona over and over until her father called the police. In college, his junior year, he didn’t get cast as Falstaff in The Merry Wives of Windsor and changed his major from theatre to business for a month.
“Nate, come on,” I said.
“I want a divorce.”
I leaned back on my heels. The rain was changing over to icy hail and it hurt.
“Come inside,” I said, pulling at him a little. “It’s terrible out here.” He shook his head vehemently.
“Oh crap, Nate. You want a divorce?” I was getting more aggravated by the minute. Cold, wet and aggravated.
“I want a divorce.”
“You want a divorce from me?”
“Yes. I want a divorce from you. From you.”
“I don’t understand.”
Nate took a deep breath, “A divorce. I don’t want to be married anymore.”
“To me.”
He looked at me with such befuddlement. I giggled.
“You think this is funny?” he asked.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s just, this sounds like ‘Who’s on first?’ I want a divorce. From me? Yes. You want a divorce? Yes. Third base.” I ran my hands up his thighs, leaned between his legs. “Nate, come on. Come inside and we’ll order a pizza and you can tell me about whatever it is that’s got you so angry at me this time.”
I’ve thought about this moment so often, in the years since. The two of us in the rain, about to free fall into an unknowable after, a bright line being drawn in the air. We were still on the before side of that line, the side where, if you’d asked about us, I’d have told you I’d loved him since I was 15. That we were the closest of friends, our lives utterly entwined. I’d have told you about the summer theatre we ran together as teenagers, when most kids have jobs at the mall. How we moved to New York City the spring I graduated from college. That he was going to be a producer and I was going to be a director, and we were going everywhere together — to Broadway, to Hollywood, to London. We were going to have an office overlooking Times Square, with a partner’s desk. Al Hirschfeld would make a sketch of us at that desk, and it would have 5 Ninas in it.
As furious as he made me, as broken as he left me, there’s no way to tell this, to talk about him, without describing what it felt like to stand next to him on an empty stage and envision what Godspell or Our Town or The Miracle Worker might look like there. To listen to him dream out loud. Nate always felt like magic hour to me, that time before dusk when the world is washed liquid honey gold. We made a mess of so much that was good between us, but before that, we made alchemy of imagination and dust, cool air and paper.
“Tabitha. I’m so sorry,” was what he said. Just that, but I’d been reading his mind for more than a decade. A shiver rippled through me and I had a sudden desire to run from him, to keep things as they were, for just a little while longer. I think I might have told him we could fix it, whatever it was. I may have begged him to stop talking. Because I knew, as if he’d handed me a script folded open to just this scene, my part highlighted in yellow and his in blue, he was gone already. He was already gone. “I’m in love,” he said. “I’ve met someone and I love her, and she loves me, and I can’t stay here anymore with you. I can’t do it.”
I stood up and backed away from him. Wrapped my arms around myself. At moments like this, really dreadful moments, I often thought about how Susan Sarandon might behave. Not herself, the actual woman, but if Susan Sarandon were playing this character, this person who came home expecting to order a pizza and drink red wine and go to sleep next to her husband, and instead discovered her life was a bomb with the fuse already lit, how would she play it? Quiet dignity? Righteous fury? Shoot him dead and then drive to Mexico with her best friend in a convertible?
That last one sounded like an idea.
“You met someone?” I asked. I sounded nothing at all like Susan Sarandon. I sounded 6 years old.
“I met someone.”
I could feel my head nodding up and down. I wanted a cigarette. I’d had my last cigarette the night before Nate and I moved to Brooklyn. I smoked it the way I’d smoked all through high school — in my bathroom, leaning out the window, with the shower running. I was 22 at the time, but I was still scared my mother would find out I smoked.
“I don’t think that’s a very good idea at all,” I said.
We stared at each other.
“You don’t think what is a very good idea?”
“Getting a divorce.” I was vibrating, I was shaking so hard. Vibrating in waves.
“You don’t?”
“No.”
He shook his head no, looked down at his black Converse sneakers. “I have been trying to make up my mind for the past three days. I kept telling myself that if I could just make a decision and stick to it for 24 hours, then that’s what I would do.”
I took a shuddery breath. “Nate, look. These things happen. You go on the road, and these things happen. But it doesn’t have to mean that we…. I can forgive you, of course I can. It was probably bound to happen at some point.”
“You don’t understand.”
I laughed, gagged sort of, but it sounded like a laugh. “I do. I really do. You’ve been away, and we’ve both been distant. Was it a one time thing, or…”
“Tabitha. No. It wasn’t a one-time thing. It’s been going on a long time now.”
“How long?”
“A while. She’s been traveling with the tour.”
“She was on the tour?”
“No, I met her before. She’s just been traveling with us.”
I had never gone traveling with the tour. With any of the tours. I had asked to come visit him on the road, but he’d told me it wasn’t allowed for insurance reasons. In all fairness, I’d just always wanted to go to San Francisco.
“Tabitha, I need to tell you…”
I shook my head, “No.” I took the few steps to the door, stopped. “I don’t want to talk about this.” I was dizzy, freezing cold. “I don’t want to talk about this. You don’t get to do this. You don’t. You don’t get to be the one who leaves.”
He stood up, took two steps towards me, grabbed my arm and pulled me towards him. Put his face close to mine. I thought he was going to kiss me, and I leaned into him. “Her name is Kimberley,” he said, so quietly. “She’s a costume mistress at Seattle Playshop. She’s 24. She’s beautiful, and kind, and the sweetest person I have ever met, and I’m going to marry her. I gave you everything. I gave you my heart and all my energy, all my attention. You need to hear me, Tabitha. I don’t love you anymore. I haven’t loved you for a long time. She’ll be here tomorrow. And I do get to be the one who leaves. Someone has to.”
He pushed me away and pounded into the apartment, and I stood shaking in the rain. Seattle Playshop. He’d been to Seattle Playshop only once, it was the first theatre on the first tour he took out. Monks, that tour. Chanting monks. I stood there, feeling my hands, feeling my feet, wanting to smoke. Lightening flashed and I counted to 8 before I heard the thunder. Why did this feel so familiar? All this drama in the rain? This raging in the swirl.
Then I got it.
I ran into the apartment, bright with rage now, found him in the bedroom, throwing clothes into a bag.
“You asshole,” I seethed. “You staged this. You’re playing Lear! You’re playing fucking King Lear while you tell me you’re leaving me. What the hell is the MATTER with you?”
“You’re crazy, Tabitha. I’m not the theatrical one here.”
“Oh, yes you are, Nate. You most certainly are the theatrical one here.” He slipped past me out of the bedroom, heading down the hall towards the bathroom. I followed him.
“And another thing. Seattle Playshop. You’ve been having an affair this whole time? The whole time you’ve been gone?”
He stopped. Turned towards me. Sighed. Theatrically. He sighed theatrically. Just saying.
“OK,” he said. “I will do this with you right now. I will answer anything you want to know, and then I never want to talk about her with you again. I don’t even want to hear you say her name.”
“You don’t want to hear ME say HER name?”
“That’s right.”
He lost his virginity to me, over Christmas break of my freshman year at college, his sophomore year. I had a boyfriend I loved, who adored me, and Nate was dating his way through the theatre department at his school, but never managing to seal the deal. We talked on the phone every day, usually at midnight, both of us smoking out our dorm windows. We’d rehearse monologues over the phone. Complain about how classes interfered with rehearsals. Bitch about the parts we didn’t get in scene study class. We had sex for the first time on the floor of my bedroom in a nest of blankets, because my parents were home and my bed squeaked. We laughed through nearly the whole thing. Joked about how we might as well get it out of our systems. I never told my boyfriend and I never felt guilty about it. I trusted Nate more than anyone I had ever known.
“When did you meet her?”
“On my first tour.”
“The first theatre of your first tour?”
“Right.”
“So, let me get the sequence of events here, the plot, if you will. You left the house, saw a woman, and immediately began having an affair with her.”
He did that jaw clenching thing I hated so much. “If that’s what you need to tell yourself.”
“And she’s coming here?”
“She is.”
“Tomorrow.”
“Yes.”
I swallowed. I didn’t want the answer to my next question, but I asked it anyway. In my experience, what you don’t know can hurt you; of course it can, sometimes far worse than everything you do know. “She’s going to your parents’ for Thanksgiving?” I whispered it.
He had the decency to look away from me. “Yes,” he said. “She’s coming for Thanksgiving.” He walked into the bathroom and started loading things into his dopp kit.
I looked around; at the mish mash of furniture we’d collected over the years, at the framed movie posters and Broadway show posters. The chairs and tables. The couch we’d bought new, the only thing we’d bought new. The basket of Playbills we’d collected. The pictures in frames, of us in high school, in college, all our cast photos. I imagined Kimberley sitting in my chair at the Alexander’s kitchen table, the one nearest the patio doors, which I had claimed the first time I drove over there on my own, the day I got my driver’s license.
The cat rubbed against my legs and I reached down and hefted his bulk against me, held him to my chest. We’d named him Harold, after Harold Hill, the lead character in The Music Man. Nate came out of the bathroom. “Once Kimberley and I get settled somewhere, I can take the cat,” he said.
“No. I’ll keep him,” I answered.
“You hate him.”
I rubbed my cheek against the top of the cat’s head. “I’ll keep him.”
“Tabitha, you didn’t even want him.”
He was right, I hadn’t. I’m not a cat person. I love dogs, in the ridiculous way that dog people love dogs, which is to say, wholeheartedly, and purely. I have lengthy conversations with dogs I meet in the street, using my dog voice. Nate wanted a cat, so we got a cat. Harold was 8 weeks old when we brought him home, our first Christmas living together, December of 1991. He wasn’t a puppy, but he was an adorable kitten, always jumping up on tall things and getting stuck there, meowing until one of us would rescue him.
“Listen to me, Nathan,” I said, in a calm voice that sounded just like Susan Sarandon in Lorenzo’s Oil, finally. “I’ll learn to love him. Or I’ll drown him. But you can’t have him.”
It’s possible I’m a tad theatrical myself.
“Fine. You keep him.” He disappeared back into the bedroom.
“I do kind of hate you,” I whispered to Harold. “But I wouldn’t kill you.”
Nate emerged, bag slung over his shoulder. He came close to me, reached out a hand and put it on my arm. “I’ll be with a friend tonight, and then Kimberley and I are going to stay at my parents’ through the weekend. You can reach me there. I’ll come back for the rest of my things after Thanksgiving, all right?”
I nodded.
“Are you all right? Is there anything I can do before I go?”
I nearly said, “Well, I certainly hope you’ll die soon,” which is a line from Broadcast News. He would have laughed at that, once. But I didn’t, because we were on the other side of the line now, in the free falling after, where our lexicon of private jokes was no longer spoken. I didn’t know what language we spoke now. Instead, I shrugged off his hand, and extended my own. “I’m going to need your American Express Card, your bank card, and your keys. You can meet me at the bank tomorrow and I’ll give you half of what’s in savings and checking.”
His eyes narrowed. “You’re serious?”
I didn’t move, just kept my hand in the air. He dropped his bag and opened his wallet, handed me the cards and his house keys. I’d expected a fight.
Then I was alone.
I’m not sure how long I stood there, holding the cat. I remember humming The Oldest Established from Guys and Dolls once or a thousand times. Good old reliable Nathan. The oldest established, permanent floating, crap game in New York.
Indeed.
Eventually I put down the cat and went outside, slipped and slid on the icy sidewalk to the corner store, where I bought three packs of Parliaments and a red lighter, then slipped and slid back home, where I lit my first cigarette in seven years and made two phone calls.
Turns out, writing a book is hard and takes a long time.
But yes, I’ve been quietly working on a novel. In fits and starts. At the kitchen table. On vacations. In airports. On the veranda at my parents’ condo in Florida. And after consulting with the people whose opinions matter to me most (my husband, Jonathan, my best friend, Lisa, and my daughter, Ripley) I’ve decided to release it on Patreon, one chapter a month.
Well, I tried. I tried Medium and I tried Substack and I even thought about TikTok for a hot second but in the end, I really love this blog and I guess I’m staying.
Here’s a picture of the cat I got during the pandemic:
As we enter into week…4?…5?…eleventybillion? of Covid-19 stay-at-home life, I’m definitely looking for ways to keep my monkey mind occupied and my cooped up body from permanently assuming the shape of the kitchen chair where I currently spend my workdays.
I’m a former theatre kid, was a legit drama major in college, started my career at Manhattan Theatre Club, and have a tendency to burst into song during meetings. And so it is not an exaggeration to say I shrieked out loud when I learned that Debbie Allen – YES, THAT DEBBIE ALLEN — is offering dance class via her Instagram.
@therealdebbieallen wants us to live forever.
It has been my dream to have Debbie Allen yell at me in dance class since I was 13. And so, I put on my leggings, t-shirt and sneakers (all the while wishing they were leotards, tights and Capezios, which I no longer own, but which used to comprise 50% of my wardrobe – the other 50% being sweatshirts with the neck cut to look like Jennifer Beals in “Flashdance”), moved all the furniture out of my living room (I live in 900 square feet with two other people, so you can imagine how this was received by my husband and daughter as they did parkour over the coffee table to gain access to the bathroom), and got ready to START PAYING IN SWEAT.
I was terrible. Comically terrible. You’ve seen videos of a newborn giraffe standing up for the first time? It was like that, but not cute. It was as if I had just discovered there are feet attached to my legs which are also connected to my body and those legs can be used for something other than holding up my torso in my kitchen chair. Eventually, I just lay down on the floor and watched Debbie, and then I put on the episode of “Fame” where Jesse is in a coma and Mrs. Berg reveals she’s a medium. (This is an actual plot of an episode of “Fame.”)
I don’t know there’s a lesson to learn from this, except to say it was reassuring and comforting to remember that once, not so long ago and also a lifetime ago, I was a kid who loved dance class and theatre school, and had big dreams. And while those particular dreams didn’t come to fruition in precisely the way I imagined they might, they were sweet and sustaining during a chunk of my life when I was scared and sad a lot of the time, and terribly vulnerable – and they remain so. Because even though I am mostly made of kitchen chair now, it’s still fun to dance around the living room. I’m glad I remembered that.
Working Without a Net 