Angela

 

Angela’s fingers part the curtain enough for her to see the growing audience just behind the near-blinding reach of the spotlights.  Standing there, she wonders if she can go through with it again, even if it is the play’s final night.  There’s the anticipation, of course; this is everything she’s ever hoped and trained for.  Still, there’s something else there, too —  blacker, heavier, full of jittery, hissing insects.  Perhaps, she thinks, it has to do with nerves, but she knows that isn’t true.  She is not nervous, not in a bad way.  She lets the curtains fall back into place.  Turning, she regards the stage — the elegant furniture; the homeliness of the couch and chairs and end tables; the soft shadows cast by the yellow light of the lamps and chandelier. She hears the hushed workings of the stagehands as they prepare, and she can discern through the preternatural quiet the murmur of voices repeating troublesome lines.

“Angela,” a woman says.

Angela turns; it is Arianna, the make-up artist who has painted her nineteen years into the future, straight into the skin of a sixty-one year old mother.  She thinks for a moment that perhaps Arianna has come bearing some delicious news, or maybe is here to wish her good luck. 

“I need to see your face,” Arianna says, and she grabs Angela’s jaw with her birdlike fingers, turning it to the side to inspect a prosthetic wrinkle and her fake sagging cheeks.

Angela thinks of saying something — anything, really — but the thought seems to dissipate like tired applause.  There is nothing to say that wouldn’t make the moment any less awkward.  She wishes, vaguely, that Arianna had become her friend.

Arianna finishes and, satisfied, releases her, then hurries away.  Surely, Angela thinks, she can’t be that busy.  But there she is, scampering from actor to actor, inspecting them like an orphanage patron before a family comes to choose.  Angela straightens the gray wig on her head, smoothes a wrinkle from her dress.

For the moment, Angela’s unease has subsided.  With the curtains about to open, she can focus on being in the scene.  Right now, she is nothing but a sixty-one year old mother; right now, there is nothing but Angela pretending to be happy.

 

With the play finished, Angela gives her final bow, smiling at the audience as the cheers and the flash of cameras fill her senses.  Then the curtains close and Angela stands there for a moment, the smile still on her lips.  As though caught between worlds, she can distinctly hear the muted roar of the crowd as they stand, stretch, begin to criticize and commend, and head toward the exits; but she can also hear the relieved giggles of the crew, the anxious release from the cast.  She can hear, as from a great distance, Manny, the director, commending them from the side of the stage.  For a moment, she is simply there.  She is only Angela Smith, anonymous, as present as a ghost.

In her dressing room, she pulls off the wig and the dress — a smock-like thing made for the elderly — and she slides a hanger with great care under the fabric.  Putting it in the small closet, she is suddenly, disturbingly, aware of how she can almost imagine herself wearing such a thing.  Suddenly, the age difference between herself and the woman she’s played seems not so large.  Even the vanity mirror tells her that; either the make-up has been expertly done, or she really is growing old.

That’s stupid, she thinks, but she touches her face with her fingers.  False liver spots and fine lines make her hands look like cracked marble.  She will have to see Arianna in a moment.  But first, she steps into a pair of loose-fitting slacks and a white blouse, lets herself fall into a chair by the vanity.  She takes a moment to breathe.

After a few seconds, Angela hears the faint talking of the woman who played the lustrous fiancée outside and the man who has come almost every day to rehearsals to support her.  Angela desperately wants not to, but she cannot help listening to pieces of their conversation.  She, of course, has no one with whom she can stand in a hallway and talk.  There’s that feeling again, that hideous depth.  It feels as though everything she is stands on the edge of some deep chasm, that she will soon fall off.  She gets the urge to leave, and she slips her sore feet into a pair of moccasins.  Opening the door — there are the lovers, she sees, sharing their tongues — Angela remembers that she must see Arianna before anyone else.  The makeup is too much to bear any longer.  She feels as though, at any moment, it will fuse itself to her, that it will crumble her and replace her with itself.

She moves down the hallway and there, almost out of nowhere, is the door to Arianna’s room.  It is cracked open, and the thin beam of light streaming through its seams almost makes Angela turn away.  She doesn’t want to be seen this way, now that her part has been played, now that the audience has departed.  But she makes herself move, because the makeup, it seems, is weighing her down, a stone tied to her back.

She forces her knuckles against Arianna’s door.

                       

With the prosthetics off, she feels a little better.  One of the makeup crew has mentioned a celebration at a small bar nearby and has even extended an invitation to which Angela has said maybe.  So, as Angela moves around her dressing room, picking up her purse, her overcoat, her umbrella (she can hear the New York rain against the roof), she considers, for a moment, the prospect of a night out.  There’s the desire for companionship, the need to fill that gregariousness deep inside her.  She wants, simply, the sharing of company.  Maybe that is all she needs.

Still, the thought of going through with it presses against her, and Angela can see the evening before her like an unwinding road:  she will go, sit, drink a little and talk even less; she will follow everyone’s conversations but think about the unwashed dishes in her sink and the vacuuming that needs to be done.  If she wants to say something, someone else will talk over her just as she’s ready to open her mouth.

When she has collected her things, she makes her way out the back door of the theater to the side street where her car sits, almost alone.  Everyone except the cleanup crew, it seems, has left.  She glances up the road, and there, turning onto 5^th Street, is the dark shape of Manny Soto’s car.  There’s already talk of an award for him, something more modestly local than a Tony, but no less appreciated, she is sure, because Manny lays his heart at the altar of good directing.  She decides then that she will go home; she would rather drive back to Jersey than face the overwhelming publicness of a night in the city.  She’ll wash the dishes, but she’ll save the vacuuming for tomorrow.  She’ll have a little wine and doze off on the couch.  It’ll be normal.  She will be safe.

She drives off into the rain and the New York anti-night, the glare from headlights and streetlamps filtering through the windshield to cast the inside of her middle-aged Corolla in a sallow hue.  Her radio is turned down low for an equal mixture of passing cars and the vocals of Joni Mitchell, who helped to carry her through college and the boyfriends who left her.  She likes driving, likes it in the same way she enjoys acting.  There’s the sense of leaving her life behind for something new, something better, even if only for a short time.  It’s cathartic, in its way, to put her foot to the accelerator and feel the response.  That, it seems, is all she has.  Still, it’s disturbingly comforting, the total anonymity in driving through nighttime New York, and Angela for a second wonders if she will stop at this club.  She realizes, suddenly, that she has no idea where it is, but she catches sight of Manny’s car up ahead; she could follow him  Or she could simply drive on, comfortable with the gentle motion of the car, the hum of passing vehicles, and the lilting voice of Joni Mitchell.  The rain, she notices, is stopping.

Suddenly, the thought of going home gives her pause.  For Christ’s sake, she thinks, I’m forty-two.  She refuses to think of what will surely happen if she goes through with this, and Angela trails Manny’s car through the traffic, wondering how far out of her way this little adventure will take her.

She spots a club up the street and watches as Manny’s car pulls behind a parked gray Honda by the curb.  Angela parks behind him, gets out, locks her doors, and lingers a few minutes in the mist, watching as Manny unfolds himself from the compactness of his car.  Why don’t I love him? she wonders.  She can imagine herself loving him; she can see it as clearly as seeing herself breathe, feeling the chill in the air.  Still, that spark, that constant run of electricity is not there when she looks at him, only a warm acceptance of the fact that there he stands, looking around.  Angela notices for the first time that someone else is with him.  The passenger door opens, and suddenly there’s the shape of a man moving through the street’s brittle glow and towards Manny.  She watches this figure as it moves, and she can see the Hispanic darkness of his skin, his hair, and she notices with great surprise as he reaches toward Manny and loops their arms together.

“Manny,” she says, as though answering a question.

They both turn to look at her, and Manny’s face stretches in a smile.  “Angela, it’s so good to see you here.  I wasn’t sure you’d come.  You’re so … private.”  He laughs, though he’s said nothing funny or untrue.

“Well, I just decided that it was time to give it a try.  I’ve never really done this kind of thing before.”  She wishes, now, that she could find some way of getting back into her car and driving off.  But Manny has seen her, talked to her, and now she is expected to go inside, for a little while at least, and there is nothing she can do.

“Angela, this is Eduardo,” Manny says, touching Eduardo’s hand with his own.  “My partner.”

“I had no idea,” she admits.  She reaches forward and, smiling, takes Eduardo’s hand, shaking it gently.  “How long have you two … ?”  She lets the question trail off and immediately regrets it.  She does not want to seem like a prude; she’s very open-minded about men loving men, but she immediately feels like her reaction has been so puritan.

“Six years,” Manny says.

“God, this weather is awful,” Eduardo says to Manny, sibilating his s’s, softening his sounds.  Angela imagines him as a man of deep emotional connections to the most trivial things; she can see him crying over ruined shoes.  “Let’s go inside.”

Manny offers his free arm to Angela, and she takes it, liking the way it feels nestled between the rainy wetness of his sleeve and the soft warmth of his side.  She misses sex, misses that connection.

Inside, there is music playing, but not so loud that the people inside must shout to hear one another.  The cast and crew, Angela sees, have collected into small aggregates — most of the hair and makeup people are together, as are the majority of the actors, and Angela notices a cluster of stagehands sharing drinks near the bar.  Manny leads her and Eduardo to a large booth off to the side, and Angela can see several familiar faces:  there’s Arianna, Desdemona (one of the costume designers), and Melanie (the set designer).  She offers a soft hello to each of them.  Manny lets her slide in, so that she is towards the middle of the booth.  She cannot help but feel a little overwhelmed. A twenty-something girl approaches, takes their drink orders.  While the others request their heavy, flourished drinks, Angela asks for a modest gin and tonic.  The waitress departs, and Angela listens as everyone starts to talk.

The conversation steers around her, although she has to speak at some length on more than a couple occasions.  Angela is, at first, reluctant to let herself relax; but when she feels her lower back begin to cramp, she lets the alcohol do its work.  Why, she wonders, is it so difficult?  She has come to know these people fairly well over the past months; they have smiled at her, shared jokes, invited her to lunch, even though she never accepts.  Surely she can allow herself one unguarded evening.  She listens as Desdemona tells of her husband’s latest corporate enterprise.

“So, Angela,” Arianna finally says, “you did really great tonight.  What a way to finish this run.”

Angela offers a smile.  “Thanks.”

“Yes, and it’s fantastic you decided to come,” Desdemona says.  Her voice is brushed with what Angela thinks must be the remains of a Swahili tongue.  “We’ve been trying to get you out somewhere for a while now.”

She laughs honestly and gives another smile, liking the way it seems to lighten her burdens. 

Glancing around, Angela catches the eyes of a man watching her from the bar and she at first wonders if something is the matter.  She tries to ignore him (he is staring, obviously), but she finds herself again and again going back to his eyes; they are trained right on her, she realizes.  She can’t even tell what color they are, but there is something there, something glittering that seems, even at a distance, so much like freedom.  He’s handsome in that cavalier, sitting-at-a-bar way, and she can tell that he is remarkably fit.  The waitress returns with their drinks.

“So, Angela,” Arianna says, “how did you get started in the theater?”

Angela pulls herself back to the table and looks into her glass.  There are tiny bubbles clinging to the sides.  “Back in high school,” she says.  “We were doing The Glass Menagerie.”

“Love Tennessee Williams,” Manny says.  “I directed a local theater version of Cat on A Hot Tin Roof — best experience of my life.”

“Let me guess, Angela, you were the daughter, right?” Arianna asks.

A light wave of laughter moves from them all towards Angela, who steels herself and takes it as best she can.  She knows it’s funny, knows she should take it in stride.  But it hurts her in her bones, her teeth; she can feel it right away.

“No,” she says, “I was Amanda.  I auditioned for Laura, but, you know, what the director says is God’s divine Word.”

And, remarkably, they all laugh.  She has said something clever, fitting, and there they are, sitting just as they have been.  She wants to tell them all that she appreciates them, their unfaltering support.  But she thinks of her best friend in college, who after all their good times together was killed in a car accident the summer before their graduation.  She thinks of her first love, who left her for a girl who could give a blowjob and make him gasp.  And then she can feel all the other nicks in her armor again.  Angela only holds up the corners of her mouth.  She takes a drink and excuses herself to the restroom.

As she makes her way to the back, she takes small peeks at the man at the bar, wondering if the man is still watching, and there are his eyes, still on her.  It unsettles her, almost as much as her memories have.  Just find someone else, she thinks to him.  I can handle disappointment.  Yet still she wants him.

In the bathroom, she urinates, then busies herself for a few moments, reapplying makeup and fixing a few stray strands of hair that have fallen like auburn strings into her eyes.  She can feel the beat of her heart, that almost teenage lovestruck uncertainty.  Unable to stop it, Angela finds her imagination pulling at the possibility that maybe he really is interested in her.  When a few more moments have passed, she takes one last unsure look in the mirror and pushes through the door.

There, again, is the laughing, talking din of the crowd, and there, before her, is the man from the bar.  The first things she notices are his eyes, deep and blue and hauntingly fragile; they look like glass, and it seems to Angela that, should they fall out, they will shatter. She cannot even begin to guess what age he might be. But she can see the way the stubble wraps around and holds to his jaw, how his skin does not droop, how his upper arms are taut with muscle.  His youth troubles her, though; her age is not something she can shrug off, not anymore, and if he has mistaken her for being younger than she is — but surely he can tell, she thinks — then it is all too possible that he will refuse her growing interest, reject her, and head off in search of other, younger, conquests.

He stands as if to impede her.  “Excuse me,” she says, and starts to bypass him.

His hand on her shoulder stops her.  “I’ve been watching you.”

There is nothing in his voice, there is everything; and he has spoken with a sternness, a control that Angela finds appealing.  His breath, blotched with the mix of a day’s meals (and mints, to cover it), is both utterly and undeniably attractive, and Angela suddenly feels a flash of heat rush through her.  Of course, she is intrigued by him — she cannot deny it — but there is also the overriding aversion to a strange man in a New York nightclub.  It has less to do with the fact that he has presumed to touch her than with his decision to pursue her at all.  Surely he has seen her by now with all of her forty-two years.  What, she wonders, does he want with me?  “I’m sorry,” she says, “I have friends waiting.”

She starts to head back to the table, but the man’s hand settles once again onto her shoulder.  Angela looks at him, a mixture of frustration and excitement (she is sure her eyes are betraying her) welling up inside.  “Let me go,” she says, but without much force.

“Would you like a smoke?”

She does not smoke anymore, hasn’t for almost twenty years.  But she thinks again of the lovers in the theater hallway.  She remembers her jealousy.  No, she thinks, but what comes out surprises her.  “All right.”

She holds his hand and lets herself be drawn from the crowd, like a child.  She is his.  Angela feels hopelessly anonymous, and when she looks at Manny and Eduardo and all the others she can see that they have not noticed her leaving; they do not know she is being taken.  She has disappeared, another face in the crowd.

He takes her to the alley beside the club, pulls a pack of Marlboros from his pocket.  He hands her one, and she takes it between her fingers as if she has never quit.

She feels shivery, certain that the temperature has dropped at least twenty degrees.  But it is only the post-rain cool and her imagination.  There’s nothing to worry about, she keeps telling herself, but she’s not sure she believes it.  She watches him take his lighter (a silver one, expensive-looking, with something engraved on the side) and strike a tongue of fire behind his cupped hand.  Then he lights hers.

“So,” he says, then takes a drag.  “What’s your name?”

“Angela,” she says.

“Angela what?”

“I don’t think I want to tell you.  Not yet.”

“Fair enough.”  He draws in and releases a thin stream of smoke.  “I’m Tom.”

Tom, she thinks.  It’s oddly engaging.  She wants, suddenly, nothing more than to know all his secrets, all his hurts, but she doesn’t ask.

“You ever been here before?”

She shakes her head no.

“What do you do for fun?” he asks.  All Angela can see are his eyes, bright within a shroud of shadow.

“I’m an actress.”

“I didn’t ask what you do, sweetheart.  I asked what you do for fun.”  There is nothing malicious in his voice, only a fox-like, subterranean cunning — Angela can see him burrowing up from the ground to catch his prey.

“I really don’t do much.”  She laughs, then, alarmingly aware of where she is, what she’s doing.  “I go out with friends,” she says, nodding towards the club and flicking a scattering of embers to the concrete.  She isn’t sure if he can see the lie, but she is certain he is aware of it. 

“Why don’t you come back to my place?  It’s not far from here.”

“I’d rather not.  Besides, I should be getting back inside.  The people I’m with are probably starting to wonder what’s happened to me.”

“I think you’re beautiful,” Tom says, and for a second Angela (who has long since forgotten that she is, in fact, quite beautiful) is unable to move.  Tom moves closer to her, and she can feel his soft breath, warm in the chilly night, against her ear.  “I want to be inside you.”

She can feel his hands on her arms, his mouth near her neck.  She does not want to give in.  But at the same time she does.  My mother died when I was nine, she wants to say, though, of course, she knows she can’t, just like she cannot tell him that her father abandoned her when she was only eleven.  “Nnn,” she moans, though she is unsure if she has meant to say no or now.  Tom puts his lips on the sensitive skin between her neck and shoulder, and he lingers there a moment before tracing a path up towards the underside of her chin, and then, finally, to her lips.  To her surprise, Angela finds that she has opened her mouth, letting his tongue meet hers.  A rush of heat, the flutter of her heart.  There, again, are Tom’s hands, now making copious observations of her loose breasts.

 

When she awakes the next morning, she is not surprised to find herself in an apartment that is not her own.  There is no fright in her — at least, nothing more frightening than the uncertainty of what she should do.  It’s been so long since this stage of the game, the morning after, that she is only peripherally aware that this goes on at all.  To her it feels like an element in a play, a situation only a character would find herself in.  The bed is empty save for her, and she listens for a minute, trying to figure out where Tom is, or if he’s even here.  She hears nothing at first, but then a rattle of pots and pans past the bedroom door and down the hallway jolts the empty air.  She starts to get up, and she feels the softness of the sheets against her bare skin, and she realizes that she is naked.  There’s a feeling inside, vaguely familiar, that gives her pause, makes her stop with her feet just over the edge of the mattress, her head only a few inches off the pillow.  But it’s not something frightening, not something that makes her want to shrink herself and float away, dustlike, through the window.  It’s something, she thinks, in the way her entire body seems to fill the space between the sheets and the mattress below; it’s something in the way her nipples defiantly brush against the bedding.  Angela immediately wants to get up, let the sheets fall where they may, and step into the kitchen.  Still, this feeling — whatever it is — goes beyond the cavalier disregard for her clothes, and it seems to have carried over into the way she walks, now, across the bedroom and to the door.  She feels stronger, more alive.  She feels very Greek, like a goddess making her way from out of the sea.

She can remember last night’s sex.  She remembers Tom undressing her, pulling her to the bed.  She remembers moving gently as Tom brought himself closer to the end, and then, she recalls, something had happened, something unexplainable.  In her mind, she can see the moment when she rolled him (had she really overpowered him?) onto his back and found herself riding him, working her way towards the brilliant white light.  She can remember thinking about the boyfriend who left her, about her missing father and her dead friend, all the people who had left her or been taken.  She remembers wanting to let them all go.  She had climaxed hard and deep then, and Tom had looked at her questioningly, as though suddenly realizing that the woman he was with was no longer the woman he had brought home.  He had gone to sleep shortly after, facing away from her, she thought, as if embarrassed.

Angela pulls the door open and heads down the hallway, taking in the artwork hung at deliberate intervals along the walls.  He has prints of Turner, Van Gogh, a Pollack, and even together, hung on walls art museum white, they seem to bolster one another, work to make the experience of moving down the hall even more surreal.  She, Angela Smith (she is suddenly proud of her name), is a painting come to life, a female form in an artist’s landscape.

In the kitchen, she catches Tom off guard, and she watches as his face twists in recognition as he takes in her nudity then moves to look in her eyes.  It is as if he is suddenly remembering that he has, in fact, slept with this middle-aged woman standing before him.  “Hi,” he says.

“Good morning,” she says, a smile tugging at the corners of her mouth.  “I hope you don’t mind, but I didn’t feel like dressing.”

There is something in his eyes that Angela notices, though she cannot settle on what it is.  She thinks that maybe he’s realized that she really is an older woman.  (She is not sure of his age, but she is nearly certain she is almost fifteen years his senior.)  Angela wonders if she, somehow, is now more an equal than a conquest to him; here she is, after all, forty-two years old and standing naked in his kitchen.  A second later, Tom turns away, almost harshly, busying himself with the all-but-finished breakfast.  He says nothing except, “It’s almost ready.”

Angela almost sits down at the kitchen table, but then stops.  Instead, she moves behind Tom, who is doing something with silverware (is it only to pass time?), and wraps her arms around his waist, kissing the slightly hairy back of his neck and letting his scent fill her nostrils.  This, she thinks, is what I’ve been missing.  Not the sex.  Not exactly.  But the power to take control of something in life.  She can feel the unease in the tension along his spine.  Still, she presses her stomach into the small of his back, letting her thighs touch the firmness of his buttocks.  At this moment, she is aware for the first time that she is a few inches taller than him, that she could (and could have done so all along) crush him.

Angela lets him go, and she sits at the table, slightly thirsty but not enough so that she will ask for a drink.  No, she wants it, rather, to be offered.  She wants the option to say no.  But he does not ask and she does not speak up.  She only watches him as he moves with what she thinks resembles the uncertainty of a novice actor improvising on stage.  She wonders, a little selfishly, if she is the first woman to have done this to him.  She has the platonic love of a teacher for him — he is obviously unnerved by her change, though he is trying not to show it — and she can see herself leaving him behind, searching, perhaps, for some other man in a nightclub somewhere, maybe even leading him outside to kiss in a darkened alleyway.  Tom, of course, she does not respect.  He is the kind of man who would leave her behind for a girl with bigger breasts and fewer years weighing her down.  She can see several of her old boyfriends in him.  Yes, she thinks, I will leave him.  Probably without much notice or noise.  They will both be happier for it.

When Tom finally forces himself to sit with her, she watches him pick at his eggs.  They do not talk at great length, but they manage to keep an unsettling silence from falling.  What, right now, could be worse than more quiet?  Her acting comes up quite a bit, as does the cast of the play.  Manny and Eduardo’s relationship makes an appearance, and when Angela finishes talking about them, she is aware of the fact that what she wants, in the way that long-separated friends want, is to have dinner with the two of them.  She is finished being lonely. 

As Angela watches Tom finish the last of his eggs, she tries to think back on her life before she was drawn to his bed.  But it feels foreign, like someone else’s.  Indeed, she does not feel like herself, or at least the self she used to be.  She is different now, stronger.  She is in control.  She thinks that, perhaps, her career as an actress is at its end; suddenly, the thought of playing a role seems unfit for her.  She has no void left to fill, no more emptiness.  What she has now is what Manny must feel when he moves an actress a foot to the right to better catch the glare of a spotlight in her eyes, what Tom himself must have felt when he brought her here last night.

She rises from the table, finds her cell phone in the bedroom, and searches through the phone’s memory for Manny’s number.  She calls him, makes arrangements for tonight, and then she pulls her clothes back on, gathers her things.  Back in the kitchen, she is surprised to find Tom cleaning dishes and wiping the counter down.  He seems so small, so extinguishable.  She wonders why she was ever intimidated by him.

Angela walks up behind him and slides her hands along his sides, puts her arms around his stomach.  She kisses him again on the back of his neck, then turns and moves wordlessly out the door.