Without You: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and the Musical Rent (28 page)

I sat silently for a moment. I was glad she was brave enough to say this, that she was dealing with everything head-on, but I didn’t want to make this decision. I looked around the room.

“I want to give Adam first choice on the books,” she said. “That’s something he told me he’d like.”

“That makes sense,” I said. “He’s reading so much now.”

“But let me know if you want anything.”

“Well, I said,” my eyes falling on her Bose radio, “I think I might like to have your radio.”

“That’s fine,” she said.

“I know how much you love it,” I said. “And I love music so much.”

“I know you’ll appreciate it.”

“Yeah.” I then got up, still holding the baby book, and sat next to her once more on the bed, holding her hand. Her eyes held mine. We hadn’t looked at each other this much since I was a little child.

On the flight back to New York, amid the antiseptic gray and blue interior of the plane, I pulled out my baby book and started reading it, and before I knew what was happening, hot tears poured out of my eyes and my breath started coming in gasps. Out of the corner of my eye, I half saw a flight attendant walking toward me, and I quickly averted my face, staring out the window at the pure blue sky and the rolling white clouds below. The baby book held so much love, so much care and concern and effort and work and hope. The enormity of Mom’s love and the gift it had bestowed on me and the terrible truth that for so long I had in many ways squandered that love, all of these things collided and spread over and through me, pressing into my chest, flooding my eyes with tears. As I choked back great, gulping sobs among strangers on an airplane, I felt horribly exposed but also surprisingly safe. I was in a different dimension, thirty-five thousand feet above the earth, where it seemed for a moment that anything was allowed.

When the tears subsided, I continued staring out the window, my breath settling, my throat releasing its gigantic lump. I watched the clouds drifting by, calm now, cleansed, marveling at the power of these moments, their sudden, almost violent ability to overcome me, and their subsequent evaporation, as if they never had happened at all but for the peace and clarity that they left in their wake.

T
he day the Clintons came to the show in April 1997, we all had to march through metal detectors and pass by numerous Secret Service agents stationed throughout the building, including the backstage and dressing room areas. Apparently there were snipers on nearby rooftops in case anyone tried anything foolish.

Almost a year into our Broadway run, it had become commonplace for cast members to take time off, but not on this day. No one wanted to miss being a part of this command performance.

We were in our offstage positions, ready to go on, when the Clintons arrived. The entire audience gave them a rousing standing ovation, complete with whoops and cheers and whistles. When everyone finally settled down, I marched out onstage with the rest of my fellow cast members and took my customary spot front and center.

The show began as usual with the house lights fully illuminated, so we had a clear view of the audience, and I quickly scanned the seats until I found the president and his family. There he was, right on the aisle of the sixth row, his chin resting in his hand, his eyes alert. An electric surge coursed through my spine and lingered in my fingers—after hundreds of performances, I was once again more than a little nervous.

And I began.

Throughout the show, periodically, I glanced over to see if I could tell how the Clintons were responding. And I can’t say that I could—Bill sat in the same position the entire time, his chin in his hand, Hillary was straight-backed and alert, and Chelsea was the same. Earlier in the run, when Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman had come, we had all remarked backstage that Tom was beaming from his seat, glowing like the superstar that he was. Bill, on the other hand, didn’t seem unhappy, but didn’t seem to be aglow either.

We’d been told before the show began that we were to line up at the end of the performance, that the Clintons would walk onstage and do a quick meet-and-greet, and then be whisked away. The whole event was to take about five minutes.

So after the last chords of the finale rang out, after we sang our last
“No day but today,”
after the curtain call and the screaming of the audience, we dutifully created our receiving line. One by one, the Clintons made their way to each of us. Bill was taller than I’d imagined and incredibly charismatic, with a palpable gravitational pull that drew me to bask in his presence. He shook my hand warmly and said, “Thank you for your performance,” smiling and looking me right in the eye. When Hillary shook my hand, I said, despite my embarrassment at being cheesy, “We share a birthday.” She smiled and responded, “Well, I’m honored.” Chelsea was poised and even glamorous, unlike her reputation. A couple of her friends had tagged along, each of them well-coiffed, well-dressed, and articulate.

Surprisingly, the Clintons lingered. Either we had been misinformed as to what we should expect, or they had liked the show so much that they wanted to hang out with us all the more (an explanation I liked to believe). They spent a good half hour onstage, mingling, chatting, and posing for pictures. I decided that I wanted to say something of substance to the Leader of the Free World, so I made my way over to Bill when he was between conversations and said, “I just want to thank you for the work you’ve done on behalf of the gay and lesbian community.” He’d received some criticism for not doing enough, and while I agreed with that criticism to a point, I still felt quite sincerely that he had done so much more than any previous president had, and I wanted him to know that I appreciated it. He replied in his soft drawl, “Well, thank you, but there’s so much more to do.” I said, “Yes, but you’ve done a lot.” And I believe that he appreciated my saying so.

I spent my next three weeks at the theatre in anticipation of Daphne’s imminent departure. She was the first of the original cast to be leaving, which didn’t seem fair or right, since she was one of the three of us who had been with the show from the beginning. But I refrained from trying to convince her to stay, from telling her how part of me was angry that she was leaving so soon. It was her choice, after all, and her prerogative, and who was I to argue?

I tried to drink in and remember every moment of her performance night after night. We didn’t share that many scenes, but I had the privilege of sitting onstage and watching her heartbreaking rendition of “Without You” every night, with her wonderfully raspy voice sailing through the theatre, her arms reaching out, groping for some kind of solace. I listened to her attack “Out Tonight” with increasing fire and abandon, seeing in my mind’s eye her daredevil assault on the bars and staircase of the fire escape that led from Mimi’s loft to Mark and Roger’s. I stood helplessly by as she broke down and cracked her heart wide open in “Goodbye Love.” And I held her ever more tightly as I carried her into our apartment in the finale, laying her down gently, and standing off to the side as Adam’s Roger sang of his love for her.

As the days wore on, I became all the more grateful that the line
“Thank God this moment’s not the last”
was true, for the moment, anyway.

On Daphne’s last night, Jesse was fighting a flu, so he wasn’t in the show with us, a cruel twist of fate that prevented all of us from sharing in her final moments together. The cast and crew and producers and Michael and Tim and everyone else in the building who could fit crammed into our tiny, unglamorous basement greenroom before the show for a champagne toast. Daphne was alert, tightly wound, like a tiger, staving off the brewing emotions that were no doubt lurking just below her surface. She and Mimi had always shared a fierce resolve, a pitched effort to be strong at all costs, which made her vulnerability, when it did show through, all the more poignant. But she didn’t seem ready to show that vulnerability here and now. If she had, I don’t think any one of us would have been able to stem the tide of sadness that would have overwhelmed us. Instead, we all solemnly held aloft our plastic cups of weak champagne and toasted our friend and colleague, who said, “To Jonathan,” before she downed her glass in one quick gulp.

As had happened on so many nights, the show took off like a rocket, riding stratospheric currents of unstoppable energy and heart and commitment. Familiar faces filled the audience. Todd was right in the front row, flashing his smile and sign-language “I love you” to me (we were in the midst of a pretty good spell without a lot of fights lately, and he had become an extended member of the
Rent
family, so it was vital that he be there to witness what was really the passing of an era). Cy was in the middle of the orchestra, her proud beaming face a beacon of love and support reflecting back at us. Jonathan’s parents were right next to her, a complex blend of stoicism and fulfillment. And there were lots of regular Rentheads scattered through the front two rows, some gripping each other’s hands in anticipation of what they knew would be a heady and heartbreaking evening.

We powered through “Rent” with more than our usual explosiveness, making every note, every gesture, every moment matter. The audience’s outlandishly enthusiastic screams at the end of the song matched our efforts.

Habitually, I would head down to the greenroom during “One Song Glory” and “Light My Candle,” but not on this night. The entire cast and crew hovered in the wings to witness the last time Adam and Daphne enacted their sweet and funny and sexy introduction to each other, and we cheered with the audience when it was over.

On and on through the night, I stole every chance I could to watch and witness this closing of a chapter in my long association with this show that I loved so much. Daphne’s performance that night was a pitch-perfect mixture of willpower and sexuality and desperation, peppered by that steely exterior of hers. But by the time “Without You” came around, her veneer of strength was beginning to crack along with her voice, and it took every ounce of resolve I had not to crumple.

Daphne had lost her mother to illness years ago, and often during the run of the show she would turn to me offstage and just check in with me. “How are you doing, Papi?” she would say, and I knew she was asking specifically about how I was doing with regard to my mom, without actually saying those words. “I’m okay,” I would reply, and that was usually the extent of our conversations about the subject. But just the knowledge that she knew something of what it was like, that she was aware enough to reach out to me in that way, had provided such comfort. And I couldn’t bear to see that go.

Nor could I bear to witness Adam losing her. Their bond was so strong, so full of deep and abiding love and respect for each other. They had carried each other through this incredible journey, on and offstage. On this last night of Daphne’s run, when she as Mimi lay dying in front of him and he reached for his guitar to begin playing and singing his farewell song “Your Eyes” to her, I held my breath—everyone onstage and in the theatre seemed to as well—when he couldn’t bring himself to begin the song, but instead bowed his head for endless and tormented seconds, unable to begin saying his last goodbye to his beloved. The entire theatre was absolutely silent in that impossibly full and painfully arrested moment, watching him breathe and gather his strength, until at last, at last, he lifted his head, plucked out his tentative notes, and somehow through his tears sang his lament.

O
n May 5, 1997, my next visit home, I lingered longer than usual at the health food store on my way to Mom’s house; I didn’t want to see how much worse she had gotten in the weeks since my last visit. I needlessly wandered the small store’s aisles, knowing that there was nothing for me to get that I hadn’t already gotten, knowing that the clock was ticking on the time I’d be allotted to spend with Mom before her final moments, which seemed to be arriving soon. And yet I couldn’t bring myself to walk out of the shop and get in my rental car and drive the last couple of miles to her door.

Finally, I paid for my nondairy vegetarian frozen dinner and my chips and my juice, and I headed home, numbly staring at Essington Road as it spread out ahead of me. At the corner of Essington and Black Road I noticed for the first time a large new prefab building made of blond brick, the sign for which told me it was a funeral home. I wondered whether that would be Mom’s funeral home.

Spring had arrived in Joliet with full force, bringing balmy breezes and clear blue skies and myriad buzzing insects and singing birds. Gael Drive looked almost picturesque on days like this, were it not for the drab uniformity of its houses’ architecture, and the too-wide, unseemly expanse of its cracked and faded pavement. I pulled into our driveway and cut the engine, pausing in the car before I got out, steeling myself as much as I could without creating too hard a shell.

“Hello,” I called out as I opened the door. I put away my groceries and headed to Mom’s room. There I found Terry, one of Mom’s hospice workers, beginning to shampoo Mom’s hair. She smiled as I walked in.

“Hi there,” she said. A small plastic bin filled with water rested on the bed next to Mom’s pillow, and her head was gently propped up by another bin, there to catch the sudsy rinse. Mom regarded me as steadily as always, her large brown eyes looking even larger without her glasses on, the effect of which was augmented by the tightness of her skin over her skull. She weakly said, “Hi, Tonio,” as Terry softly massaged shampoo into Mom’s hair. I sat at the edge of her bed and watched, holding Mom’s hand. Terry went about her task with care, tenderness, and love, and Mom simply gave herself over to the comfort. I looked up at Terry’s face and noticed that she was crying softly as she finished rinsing the last of the suds out of Mom’s sparse, thin hair. I wondered whether she felt such sadness for all of her patients, or whether Mom was special.

When Terry was finished she kissed Mom delicately on the top of her head, wiped her eyes, and said to me, “Have a nice visit,” before she left the two of us alone.

“Hi, Momma,” I said.

“Hi, Tonio.” I wondered whether there was any part of her that was ashamed that she couldn’t perform the simple task of washing her own hair. “How was your flight?”

“Fine,” I said. “How are you feeling?”

“Oh, I’m tired,” she said.

“I can imagine.”

“I’m glad you’re here, though.”

“Me too, Momma,” I said. “Me too.” She seemed to be farther away than before, less tethered to her body. I gripped her hand tightly, but not so tightly, I hoped, that I caused her pain. “Momma,” I said, “I wanted to ask you something.”

“What is it?”

“Remember how I told you about the wall at the Nederlander?”

“Yes.”

“I was wondering if you could write something for it, so I could put what you wrote there.”

“Of course,” she said.

The wall had begun early in our previews on Broadway, when celebrities had started to attend our show. Our doorman had decided to ask them to sign the alley wall that led to the stage door. They obliged, and right away, the cast extended the invitation to friends and family as well. Now, over a year after opening, barely any empty space remained. Since Mom had only come to the show on opening night, in the flurry of activity before and after the performance, I had forgotten to bring her backstage to sign the wall. Now I could laminate whatever she wrote and affix it to the concrete.

I noticed a small stationery box on her bedside table. “Maybe you could write on the inside of this,” I said. “It’s sturdy.”

“Sure,” she said.

I carefully cut open the flaps of the box and handed it to her.

“I have to write with this pen,” she said, pointing to an oversized, extremely light pen resting on her bed tray. I handed it to her.

“Thanks, Momma,” I said, and I rose off the bed so I wouldn’t be hovering over her. I sat on the floor in front of her large bookcase, busying myself by looking through her collection: Anne Tyler, Raymond Carver, Barbara Kingsolver, and shelves full of others. I wondered how many of them she had read. One of her favorite T-shirts had the words
SO MANY BOOKS, SO LITTLE TIME
emblazoned on it.

For many minutes I sat there, occasionally glancing back at Mom to see how she was doing. She was lost in concentration, focused entirely on her note. I envisioned taking it to a laminator and proudly sealing it to the wall, sharing what she’d written with my cast mates and friends who would stop by the theatre. It seemed to be taking her an especially long time; she must have had a lot to say. Finally, as I was flipping through her copy of
Ellen Foster,
I heard her quietly say, “Okay, Tonio, I’m done.”

I eagerly got up and headed over to her bedside and took the piece of cardboard out of her hand. And as soon as I looked down at what I held, I saw that she hadn’t taken so long to write it because she’d had a lot to say; she had taken so long because it had been a physically draining and difficult task. Her normally pristine handwriting had been reduced to almost illegible, wavering scribbles. I gasped, the heat rising in my face; I had not thought that what I was asking her to do would be this difficult. I felt selfish and inconsiderate, stupid and ignorant. And then I read what she had written.

By the time I got to the end, tears had sprung to my eyes, my breath had tightened, and before I knew it, I was gripping my mother’s hand tightly, while turning my face away. “Thank you,” I said through my sobs. “Thank you so much.”

She just gazed at me with peace and love and stillness. “You’re welcome, Tonio,” she said. I looked at her, unable to stop my tears, and as she held her gaze, she gently raised her free hand and ever so lightly rested it on my forehead, softly stroking my hair. She didn’t say anything more. She just watched me as I wept, holding my hand and soothing my brow. I had been so afraid of letting go in front of her, of burdening her with my sorrow, but of course my weeping wasn’t a burden to her. She was my mother, and this was one of the things mothers were supposed to do: provide comfort and love to their children when they were in pain.

“Thank you,” I said again.

Later, Roberta stopped by. She enveloped me in a bear hug in the kitchen. I hadn’t seen her since
Rent
’s opening night on Broadway, although we’d spoken a couple of times since then when I’d wanted to know how Mom was doing without asking Mom herself. Roberta and her husband, Bob, had moved from Southern California to a Chicago suburb a couple of years ago to be closer to Mom after she got sick, and Roberta had become Mom’s primary caretaker, as well as assuming the role of executrix of Mom’s small estate.

“How are you holding up?” I asked her.

“Okay.” Her big eyes were wider than normal and a little hollow, but strength was, as always, emanating from them. “I’m going to see how our Mary Lee is doing.”

When she left the kitchen I stood there, not sure what to do in this house that had been mine but no longer felt like mine. Especially with its pervasive, stifled air of illness. Restless, I grabbed the phone and checked my messages, discovered there were none, and then found myself staring at the wall. I thought about calling Todd, but, even though we were in a relatively calm moment together, I never knew how he would be on the other end of a phone, so I decided against it.

Mom slept the rest of the day, and I spent some time just sitting with her, watching her shrunken chest softly rise and fall with her shallow breath. I gazed at the bone tumor that had emerged on her forehead, just below her hairline, her pale skin taut and shiny over the bump. I considered her Demerol pump for long moments, and contemplated disobeying her handwritten sign and pushing the button. I rose and looked at the plastic bag that was collecting her urine, lashed to the end of her bed. The urine looked dark and murky. What did that mean? I wondered whether she was dreaming, and whether her dreams were drug-addled fantasies or calm visions of what might be waiting for her in the next life, if there was a next life. Or was her body so wrapped up in its battle against her disease that it could spare no energy for dreaming or anything else, leaving her in a state of total blankness?

I wanted desperately, selfishly, to be there by her side for her final moments. To live that dramatic deathbed scene from so many movies with her, where I would tell her I loved her one last time before she closed her eyes forever, and I would watch her breathing slow and slow and slow and then stop, and I would witness that beautiful transcendent moment when a soul leaves its body. I could practically hear the orchestral accompaniment. I wanted to have that experience with my mother, with all of its melodrama and beauty.

And I wanted this to happen sooner rather than later. How much longer could she possibly hold on? She had already confounded everyone’s expectations by living for over four years after her initial diagnosis. Her mind even seemed to be starting to slow down. All signs were pointing to the end. So what was she waiting for?

The next morning after I awoke, I went to her room and sat next to her for a long while. She barely stirred, even when I said hello and squeezed her hand. She seemed to be smaller and smaller every time I looked at her.

“Momma?” I said, louder than before. “Momma?”

Her eyes finally opened, taking a long time to focus. “Hi, Tonio.” Her voice was faint.

“I want to stay,” I said, not knowing before I said it that it would come out of my mouth. She looked at me and considered this. What I didn’t say, but what I think she knew I meant, was
I want to stay because I think you are about to die, and I want to be here when you do.

“Are you sure you can?” she said.

“Yeah,” I said. “My understudy can go on for me. I want to stay, Momma.”

She blinked slowly several times.

“All right,” she said.

I took a deep breath. “Do you want me to call Adam and have him come home now?” What I didn’t say was
Maybe if Adam comes home, and he and Anne and Rachel and I are all here with you, maybe then you will finally be able to say goodbye and let go.

She looked away, her brow furrowed, and said, “I don’t know.”

“Don’t you want to see him again?”

“Yes…”

I tried to swallow down the guilt that was now crowding its way into me as I pressed forward; I was uneasy with the idea of forcing my mother’s hand in her own death. But I kept on with it anyway, trying to engineer as much of an opportunity as possible for the end to arrive. “He can come as soon as you want him to, Momma.”

She looked at me again, and I felt keenly that she knew what I was saying. She blinked slowly, holding me in her gaze, then blinked again, the vein in her forehead pulsing, her eyes so sad. And then finally, she said quietly and clearly, “Okay.”

When I left her to sleep some more, I braced myself against the wall of the hallway as a fresh wave of tears flowed out of my eyes. I had bawled so much already—wouldn’t all these fucking endless tears eventually get used up? Wiping my face, trying to control my breathing, and without thinking, I stumbled to the phone in the kitchen and dialed Friends In Deed, asking for Cy.

“This is Cy.”

“Cy, it’s Anthony,” I said, managing to speak around my sobs.

Her voice became low and intense. “How are you?”

“I don’t know,” I said, my words tumbling out. “I’m home and my mom seems like she’s going, it seems like it might be the end, maybe, and I thought I was ready, but I don’t know…”

“Is she conscious?”

“Yeah, she’s conscious, but I don’t know, she seems like she’s fading, and I can’t stop crying, you know? I just can’t stop crying. I feel like my heart is breaking, like it’s breaking out of my chest.” I sighed deeply. “It’s so
hard.
”