Without You: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and the Musical Rent (26 page)

“I think it’s a good thing, Tonio,” she said, still quietly, but sincerely. I squeezed her hand. I had been so prepared for this conversation to be difficult, for it to turn dark and fraught with tension, that I had to let down my guard and allow in the fact that it was going well. “People can be so cruel,” she said. “A parent doing something like that to their own child.”

“Yeah,” I said. Relief was spreading through my body. “So anyway, I just wanted to share that with you. I wanted you to know about all of that.”

“Well, thank you. It’s very nice, Tonio.”

On something of a roll, I decided to open up another potentially tricky subject, my relationship with Todd. I pulled out of my backpack a little folder I’d brought with me. “I wanted to show you these,” I said and handed her the folder. Inside were two black and white portraits of Todd that I’d taken. “That’s Todd.”

She regarded them for a moment and then said, “He’s so
dark.
He’s like the opposite of you.”

I smiled. “Yeah.”

“He hasn’t shaven,” she said.

“He doesn’t shave very much, no.”

“He’s cute,” she said.

“Yeah,” I said. “I wish you could meet him.”

“I wish I could meet him too.”

“He’d come for a visit, but I know that’s not really possible.”

Mom sighed a little. “No, I don’t think so.”

I sighed as well. “He told me to say hello to you and that he’s thinking of you.”

“That’s nice.”

I was happy that she was so willing to talk about Todd (and now that he and I had been solidly seeing each other for five and a half months it really was a bona fide relationship), but the reminder that she was in no condition to meet him encroached on my sweet mood. So I introduced another new subject, this one happier than the last.

“Can you tell me about my birth again?” I asked. It was almost my birthday, and I wanted to hear all of Mom’s stories about my childhood again before she was gone.

“Sure, what do you want to know?”

“I don’t know, the whole thing. Weren’t you going to have me at home?”

“I almost did. But not because we’d planned it that way. Your labor was so short. You were an easy baby to have. You were ready to come out and you just came right out.”

“And was my umbilical cord really that long?” I knew that it was, but I wanted to hear her say it again.

“It went all the way from me and down to the floor and up to you in the doctor’s arms.”

“Why was it so long?”

“They don’t know. I think it’s part of the reason why you’re smart.”

I smiled. “I don’t know, why would that be?”

“Well, who knows?” She smiled. “And then the doctor put you in my arms and when I held you, you looked right at me, you looked right into my eyes. And I knew then and there that you were special.”

It was nice to see her smile. I knew I was being self-indulgent, asking her to tell me all over again such lovely stories that I already knew, but she was enjoying herself as well. I had heard this story of my birth so many times that I felt I’d seen it played out in a movie. I even had an image of the obstetrician in my mind: a red-faced, middle-aged, chubby man with glasses, marveling at my impossibly long umbilical cord. I then saw the gauzy close-up of my radiant mother, sweaty but aglow from just having given birth, cradling the tiny pink version of myself, the two of us gazing lovingly into each other’s eyes, as sweet music played in the background. And all was well with the world.

B
ack home in New York, the warm glow I’d felt from being in my mother’s presence quickly faded, and into its place crept a nagging, raw, harsh edge. I was starting to fray, to grow tired of holding myself together night after night onstage, of staving off the low hum of dread and anticipation that I would soon get news that Mom had died. I was physically spent from the rigors of eight shows a week (with an almost impossible five of them in just three days on the weekends). I loved doing the show, and was grateful for having a job, which was already affording me a more comfortable life for myself than I’d ever known, filled with good food, good friends, and lots and lots of enthusiastic fans. But with all of the attendant stresses, I would grow impatient and irritable at the slightest provocation—in one instance, I had to restrain myself from nastily chewing out a deli counter clerk for being slightly less than attentive to the person in front of me.

Todd bore the brunt of my new bite.

“I need to talk to you about something,” he said one afternoon before I had to leave for the theatre. “About what you said yesterday.”

It didn’t matter what it was that I’d said—I was now off and running. “I can’t
do
this right now,” I snapped.

And then he was off and running: “You never can. I can never talk to you about this stuff.”

“My mother’s
dying,
Todd.” And as I said those words I knew I was playing a terrible, patently unfair trump card.

“I know she’s dying, you think I don’t know that?”

“Of course I think you know that.”

“So I can’t talk? So I have to be silent?” he said.

“Yes,” I said, my eyes burning. “Yes. Just for right now. Just
right now.
This will be over but
right now
I can’t handle it.” My forceful voice and lashing hands scared me but I couldn’t stop myself.

“You’re asking me not to be
myself,”
Todd said. “You’re asking me to stifle myself.”

“No I’m not, I’m asking you not to
come at me
with stuff. Not
now.”

“I have to be able to express myself, though,” he said. “Or this isn’t a relationship.”

I knew in many ways he was right, but I couldn’t say that. Instead I said, “Todd, I need you to just
be there
for me.”

“But what about me?”

Fury leaped out of me. “This is
NOT ABOUT YOU RIGHT NOW!!!
This is about my mother who’s dying—my
mother
who’s
dying
—and I can’t take it from you right now!”

“Then I can’t be in this anymore,” he said, his face darkening, his eyes hooded. “I can’t give up myself like that.”

“Fine, then go!”

“You’d really like that, wouldn’t you.”

“We have to stop this conversation, I can’t have this conversation anymore, we have to
stop,
just
stop.”

And then I slammed the door and went off to the theatre and poured all of that rage and drama into the show; I sang my heart out and felt purged of the morass by the end of the night. And as much as I didn’t want to fight with Todd, I couldn’t bear the thought of being alone at this time with everything going on, I couldn’t fathom facing it by myself. When I went home and saw Todd, he seemed to have forgotten whatever it was that he had wanted to talk about in the first place, and we were calm again. Later, as I lay with him, I knew that I couldn’t keep hiding behind Mom’s illness, I couldn’t keep using that to prevent necessary conversations from taking place, but I didn’t say that. He deserved more than I was able to give him, didn’t he? But I also deserved a little more patience and understanding from him, didn’t I? At the very least we could try to find a compromise. But these thoughts chased themselves around each other, not finding their way out, and I just lay there with my head on his chest, which had become my favorite position, and began to drift off to sleep.

During my next visit home, I tried to talk to Mom about my temper, which was beginning to frighten me.

“I get so angry sometimes, Mom,” I said. As usual, my new openness with her caused my words to threaten to lodge themselves in my throat. I wondered if she could hear how small my voice sounded.

“Well, that’s natural,” she said.

“I have such a temper,” I said.

“Well, it’s okay. Just don’t hurt anybody.”

I was surprised to hear her talk about anger this way; she’d always had such a hard time allowing herself to get angry, and she’d come from a household in which her own mother’s anger was often swift and toxic and violent and destructive. Mom had only really lost her temper with me on a couple of occasions, both of them during my adolescence. The first occurred when I was thirteen and gave her a brattily hard time about going to bed on time the night before a big speech tournament.

“You have to go to bed
now,”
she’d said. She had cornered me right outside my room, her hands on her hips, her mouth set tightly, and her voice a little bit louder than normal, its pitch lower, its sound amorphous, like a muffled French horn.

“I can go to bed whenever I feel like it,” I’d retorted. “You can’t
make me
do anything I don’t want to do.” I knew how ridiculous I was being. But I hated—
hated
—Mom telling me how to live my life.

“Anthony, if you don’t go to bed
right now
you’re going to be in big trouble.”

She had never really punished me, so I couldn’t imagine what sort of big trouble I could be getting myself into. I couldn’t resist smirking, nor could I resist saying, “I don’t give a shit.”

And with that, faster than I could see or move to stop her, Mom’s left hand leaped from the side of her hip to connect with a stinging, shocking slap to my right cheek. She had never,
never,
laid a finger on me, aside from a couple of long-forgotten spankings I’d received as a toddler. I couldn’t believe it, and as I stared her down, shaking my head, I heard myself say without thought, “If you
ever
do that again, I swear to god I’ll slap you back.” And I turned around into my room, slamming the door.

In our usual fashion, neither of us spoke of this fight, and I let it go. But a few months later, when we were living in New York during rehearsals for the play
Precious Sons,
I had grown restless with Mom’s constant presence; I wanted to be an adult
now,
I didn’t want to have to answer to her or have her follow me around the city—and I do mean follow. I took to walking very quickly down the street, leaving Mom huffing and puffing behind me as she implored me to slow down and walk with her. But I just ignored her and kept up my pace, not even looking at her when she occasionally caught up with me at a crosswalk.

In the text of
Precious Sons,
the mother and father, Bea and Art, constantly bicker, playfully putting each other down, until the playfulness turns sour and escalates to an all-out war. One of their more common exchanges in the play is:

Bea:
Shut up, Art.

Art:
Oh, Bea, shut up yourself.

Pretty basic and silly, but the rhythms of the play had seeped their way into my subconscious after I’d spent hours every day listening to the same bits of dialogue. During rehearsals for a play, the text often takes on the life of a song that I can’t get out of my head, and I find myself parroting back phrases wherever they fit in conversations. One afternoon in the middle of the rehearsal period, I was reading a book in my bedroom while Mom was on the other side of the wall, in the living room, reading a book of her own. There were often long stretches of silence between us these days, but this stretch was broken with her voice wafting through my open door.

“Anthony, are you studying your lines?”

I put my book down and glared at the ceiling. I didn’t
need
to be studying my lines; memorizing lines was always easy for me, and I was already mostly off book.

“No, I’m reading,” I called out.

“Well, don’t you think you should be studying your lines?”

“No, I don’t, Mom.” It was unusual for her to get all stage-motherish on me, but here she was doing it, and it pissed me off.

“I really wish you would do some work today.”

“God, Mom, can’t you just leave me alone?”

“Oh, shut up, Anthony,” she said.

And I said automatically, with no thought, “Shut up yourself.” And suddenly there she was, having stormed out of her seat into my room, and for the second time in my life she reached back and planted a giant slap on my face, on my left cheek this time. Before I knew what I was doing I reached out and slapped her back, hard, only I missed her face, hitting her glasses instead, sending them flying into the wall.

“I
told
you if you ever slapped me again I’d slap you back,” I roared. Tears leaped to Mom’s eyes, her chin crumpling, as she blindly groped for her glasses.

“I
told
you,” I said again. And wordlessly, she fumbled her glasses back onto her tear-streaked face and left my room.

She never did slap me again, and, as usual, we didn’t talk about the fight afterwards.

Eleven years later, in her bedroom in Joliet, sitting on her bed while holding her hand, as gentle classical music wafted through the room, I asked her if she remembered these fights.

“Well, yes, of course I do,” she said. “They were very sad.”

“I’m really sorry, Mom,” I said.

“Oh, Tonio, it’s okay. It was a long time ago.”

“I’m sorry I was so mean to you during that time. I’m sorry I left you in the dust on the street.”

“Oh, you were just going through a phase, I knew that.”

“But still, it wasn’t very nice of me.”

“Well, it was hard, but I knew you were growing up and you needed your space and on some level I understood that. I didn’t always like it. You were always such a sweet boy, so it was hard to see you lose some of that sweetness.”

I sighed. “I’m sorry, Momma.”

“But you’re still a sweet boy.”

“Lately I don’t feel too sweet. I’m so on edge.”

“Well, but that’s natural. You’re going through a lot right now.”

I gulped slightly before I said, “And things have been hard with Todd.”

I still didn’t know how she’d respond to the subject of my relationship with Todd, but without missing a beat, she said, “Well, it sounds like Todd is very needy.”

I was surprised that she was engaging so fully in the conversation. “I guess he is, but I’ve been hard to deal with lately, so it’s not all him.”

“Well, as I’ve tried to tell Annie over the years, the most important thing in a relationship is communication. Your dad and I needed a lot of help with that. And we didn’t get the help we needed.”

This was also new, to hear her talk openly about her relationship with Dad. And the serenity with which she was discussing all of this with me was also new; I didn’t sense any of her usual discomfort. She continued to look at me steadily and hold my hand, exuding peace and patience and more than a little love.

“Do you think you guys might have stayed together if you’d had that help?” I asked.

“Oh, I don’t know. We were both pretty young, and there’s a lot of things we both could have done to try to make it work.”

Another new piece of information. I’d never heard her take even partial responsibility for the divorce.

“Did you really love each other?” I asked, settling into the conversation more readily. It was much easier for me to ask questions of Mom than to reveal more of my own issues with Todd. And I knew that there wasn’t going to be a lot more time to discuss all of these things with her.

Mom nodded slowly. “Yes, I think we did. He was very good to me, and I was very happy to be married, and I loved you kids so much, and he was always a nice man. But then we just started having problems.”

“Have you talked to him lately?” I asked.

“Oh, he calls every once in a while to see how I’m doing. He never changes. Good old Doogles.” Her teasing mangling of Douglas into Doogles had existed since I was a child. “He always says he’s still learning.”

I smiled. “Well, he is, though. What’s wrong with that?”

Mom laughed. “He’s been learning the same things over and over and over again. You’d think sooner or later he’d get it right.” She sighed.

“Well, it’s nice that he calls you,” I said. I always felt the need to defend Dad to the other members of our family who were often hard on him, even though he sometimes drove me crazy as well.

“Yes, it’s nice. He still doesn’t know how to talk to me, though. He just rambles on and on.”

Now it was my turn to laugh. “Yeah, but he’s getting better at stopping the rambling if you tell him that he’s doing it too much. You just have to get him back on track.”