Without You: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and the Musical Rent (13 page)

To which Mark responded,
“Perhaps it’s because I’m the one of us to survive!”

The exchange ended without any real resolution, and all in all it felt much more potent and fraught with conflict and truth than what had been there before.

The song that Jonathan had played for me over the phone while I was working on
Twister,
“What You Own,” came next, replacing the light musical-comedy number “Real Estate” that had appeared in the same spot a year before. Incredibly challenging to sing, with its long phrases—all belted at the top of my range and the top of my lungs—and its intricate, weaving harmonies, “What You Own” quickly became my favorite song to sing in the show. I loved blasting myself out of my skin as I sang, riding on its propulsive beat, soaring over and through and alongside Adam’s amazing voice. And I found Mark’s opening lyrics to be reflective of my own struggles to come to terms with Mom’s illness and its implications:

As I sang the song, I knew once again that I shared Mark’s ability to avoid dealing with pain in his personal life by pouring himself into his work. I’d been doing the same thing for the past year as I jumped from one job to the next, hardly calling home, while Mom suffered through her scans and surgery and chemo and radiation treatments and MRIs. I was grateful, however, for this new opportunity to tap into my detachment and fear and put it to use on stage.

Even though we only had two nights and one day off from rehearsal for Christmas, my brother and I flew home. Mom seemed to be continuing her rebound, although she spent most of Christmas Day lying on the couch in the living room, her new favorite spot.

Every year, Mom asked Adam for the same Christmas gift: to draw one of his loony cartoons of our family. Mom treasured the several satirical family portraits he’d made for her over the years, saving them all in a folder and pulling them out once in a while so she could lose herself in laughter. In one, Adam depicted me with the body of a tortoise (for some bizarre, unknown private joke of a reason, he and Anne had taken to calling me “Turtle Boy” that year) but with my own oversized, human head. Adam and Anne had also taken to calling me “Pumpkin Head” that year, in honor of my larger-than-normal cranium, so out of the top of my cartoon head sprouted a pumpkin stalk. (It was far from flattering.) In another portrait, Anne stood in her bra, curling her hair, a goofy, ditzy expression on her face, surrounded by thought balloons filled with crazy images of the various boys on whom she had crushes. Inevitably, Adam’s cartoon versions of himself were flawlessly rugged and muscular and dashing, a detail that made Mom laugh all the more.

For the past several years, however, Adam had stubbornly refused to draw a new portrait for Mom, for no particular reason that I could discern. She’d beg him again and again, but he’d always say no, and he’d always mean it. But this Christmas he came home and holed himself up in his room for a while, finally emerging with a new portrait. Maybe he’d done it now because he knew that he might not have another chance to give Mom what she so deeply wanted.

I was sitting in the living room with Mom when Adam strolled out of his room and handed her the new portrait. I pulled out my camera so I could capture her reaction.

“Oh, Adam,
thank
you,” Mom said, clutching the piece of paper to her chest before looking at it. “Thank you, thank you,
thank
you.”

“You’re welcome,” Adam said. He looked sheepish, like he was stifling a bigger smile underneath the small one he’d permitted to cross his face. He leaned down to Mom and gave her a brief hug. “Now look at it,” he said.

Mom laid back down, a bright shaft of sunlight crossing her face, and raised up the portrait to study it. She immediately started laughing her quiet, high-pitched, breathy laugh, her mouth wide open, the force of her laughter squinting up her eyes. I clicked away with my camera.

“Oh, Adam,” she said. “Oh, Adam, you’re a
riot.”

“Let me see!” Rachel said, and leaned over the arm of the couch so she could get a look as well. She started giggling with Mom. “That’s
funny,”
she said. “Adam, you’re
funny.”

“You are, Adam,” Mom said. “You’re so
good
at this.” And then a fresh wave of laughter overtook her. I clicked some more shots. I didn’t even need to look at the portrait myself; I knew it would be brilliant, and I was content to capture her reaction. I loved watching her laugh; it happened so rarely anymore.

My brief visit home ended, and I headed back to New York for more
Rent
rehearsals, which continued at a productive and wonderful pace. The show was already taking shape, the ensemble blending together beautifully. I was elated by our progress.

At about the midway point in our rehearsals, Michael announced that we were going to come back from our lunch break that day and meet with a guest speaker, a woman named Cy O’Neal, who ran an organization called Friends In Deed. I pricked up my ears at this news; I had heard of Friends In Deed the year before, when I attended their gala benefit, a tenth-anniversary concert performance of
Sunday in the Park with George.
Since then, I’d been on their mailing list, receiving newsletters that informed me that Friends In Deed was an organization dedicated to offering free counseling and services to anyone faced with a life-threatening illness. This included the caretakers and loved ones of people who were ill, so I’d considered going to a meeting or workshop but had stayed away. I wasn’t sure why. Maybe because I was afraid of really talking to anyone about how I felt about Mom’s cancer. Maybe because I wasn’t sure I was able to articulate to myself how I felt about it, let alone anyone else, and if I started to open my mouth and express my chaotic, unpredictable, confusing, upsetting feelings, it seemed likely there would be no end to them. Maybe I didn’t go because I thought that most everybody at Friends In Deed was dealing with AIDS and had much more urgent concerns than I. Or maybe it was all simple procrastination on my part. But from the little I knew about Friends In Deed, their work seemed potentially life-changing, so I was happy to be getting the chance to listen to Cy O’Neal speak.

When we got back from our break, our chairs were arranged in a semicircle. I sat across the room from Jonathan and a few seats down from Cy, a straight-backed, tall, thin, elegant, and earthy middle-aged woman who had floated into the room and quietly taken her seat. She wore a dark turtleneck, dark jeans, and dark glasses, all of which were offset by her several silver rings, a large silver bracelet, and a pair of silver earrings. Her salt-and-pepper hair was cut short, to about a schoolboy’s length, with a side part. In some ways she looked like my mom, albeit much more refined and with a lot more silver jewelry. My mom had always cut her hair short, often took to wearing turtlenecks and jeans, and had worn tinted glasses at different points in her life. I sat and watched Cy as she intently and eagerly looked around the room while we slowly filtered in and took our seats. She sat perfectly straight, almost on the edge of her chair, her hands folded in her lap, her feet planted firmly, her legs uncrossed. She immediately struck me as possessing an odd combination of monk-like serenity and old-school New York City glamour.

When we were all assembled, Michael handed the proceedings over to Jonathan.

“Everybody,” Jonathan began, his tone mild-mannered and respectful, “I’m very happy that Cy agreed to come here today. It was important to me that you all would get a chance to meet her and hear what she had to say. I don’t know how much you know about Friends In Deed, but they’re an amazing organization. When my friends Gordon and Pam and Matt all became HIV-positive, they asked me to go to meetings at Friends In Deed with them, and I did, and it really helped us all deal with everything. I just responded to how they viewed life and death and illness and all of it. And so it’s really informed what I’ve written. I wrote the Life Support scene as an attempt to capture what goes on at Friends In Deed.

“So, anyway, I asked Cy if she’d be willing to come to our rehearsal, because I felt it was important for all of us to hear her speak, and she said she would, and here she is, and here we are.”

“Yes, here we are,” Cy said, her voice husky and refined and warm all at the same time.

“So,” Jonathan continued, turning to Cy, “I thought I’d start everything off by asking you some questions. I wrote up a list of what I thought was important for everyone to know.” He flashed a sheet of notebook paper he’d been holding in his lap.

“Okay,” Cy said, smiling. “Sounds good.”

First, Jonathan asked her to explain what Friends In Deed was and the organization’s philosophy.

“Well,” Cy began, “at Friends, we come from the point of view that, in life, there are no accidents. It’s all okay. There is nothing really ever
wrong.
Everything in life is exactly the way that it should be, very simply because that’s the way that it is. There is no other way that it
can
be.” She paused, letting us mull these ideas over to ourselves. She continued:

“Another very important aspect of our work at Friends is our point of view that the quality of our lives is not determined by the circumstances. So if you have AIDS, for instance, while your physical body may very well be under attack from a terrible virus, and while this circumstance may make the business of living much more difficult in many ways, we suggest that the presence of AIDS in your life does not mean that the quality of your relationships, or the amount of love you experience, or even your sense of yourself, none of it has to suffer. This is not necessarily easy stuff for people to consider sometimes, as you can imagine.”

Intrigued and stirred up, I raised my hand and asked, “If you’re saying you come from the point of view that nothing’s ever wrong, that everything’s always okay, what do you do with anger and sadness and grief when something bad happens?”

Cy regarded me for a tiny moment and then replied, “Well, try to think of it this way: there are two realities. On the one hand, you have this idea that I’ve been talking about, this reality, that it’s all all right.” She held up her right hand as she said this. “And on the other hand,” she continued, holding up her left hand in opposition to her right, “you have all of your opinions, and all of your feelings, and all of your notions about it. Like ‘it’s terrible,’ or ‘it hurts,’ or ‘I don’t like it,’ or ‘it’s painful,’ or ‘it’s sad.’ And the goal is to be able to live with both realities.” And with that she brought her hands together. “Neither one is more true than the other. Neither one is better than the other.” She leaned forward, resting her elbows on her knees. “I lost my husband, Patrick, to cancer a couple of years ago, and believe me, when it was happening, I was absolutely devastated. It was incredibly painful. I missed him terribly when he died. I still miss him terribly. And, at the same time, while he was dying, and in the years since he’s died, I can also see that it’s all okay. It’s all happened exactly the way that it should have happened, because that’s the way that it happened. There’s no other way that it
could
have happened. It’s simple.” She leaned back. “But sometimes I could no longer see that, and I would feel overwhelmed by grief and sadness, and I would feel terrible, and I would cry, and miss him, and then with time, all of that would pass, and once again I’d see that everything was okay. That my grief was just as much a part of my life as everything else. There’s nothing wrong with grief. It’s an entirely appropriate response. Of course we feel grief. The trouble is, in our culture, there isn’t always a lot of permission for people to grieve. And so we think that we shouldn’t go through it, and we stifle it down, because it’s not allowed. And that’s when we get ourselves in trouble. But grief is absolutely real, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with feeling it. Quite the opposite.” She paused again and regarded me with her clear and open gaze. “Does that answer your question?”

“Yes,” I said. “Yes, it does. Thank you.” I resolved to try to incorporate all that she’d just said into my life, not very confident that I’d be able to, but already feeling comforted.

A couple of weeks later, we moved into our technical rehearsals, the last stage in our process before opening the New York Theatre Workshop’s doors to the public. I wondered how Jonathan was feeling; I hadn’t seen much of him lately, except for the day he’d dashed into the rehearsal room, waving a ream of papers, and promptly sat down at the piano. He’d started pounding out his new song for Maureen and Joanne, “Take Me or Leave Me.” Its groove and chord progression reminded me of the classic R&B song “Lean on Me,” but that’s where the comparison stopped. Instead of composing something that was blindly derivative, Jonathan had written a truly original, supremely catchy, sublimely raucous pop tune, giving Idina Menzel and Fredi Walker, who played Maureen and Joanne, the opportunity to blow the roof off the theatre. Idina is an outrageously gifted rock and roll singer, very different from Sarah, who’d played Maureen in the workshop production. Idina’s Maureen was all sex appeal and eagerness, while Sarah’s had been all restraint and pretension. I had been fond of Sarah’s rendition, but I was thrilled by Idina’s. Listening to her and Fredi learning and rehearsing their new song, their voices bursting with fire and energy, their sound contrasting and blending flawlessly, both of them trying to top each other without turning it into a ridiculous
Star Search
contest, was one of the most exciting aspects of the last two weeks of rehearsal.