Fiction Ruined My Family - Jeanne Darst [58]
I’M LAZY. I’m forgetful. I go too far. I don’t know when to stop. I need to grow up. I am not a people person, nor am I organized or highly organized, enthusiastic or responsible. I’m not a self-starter or a problem solver. I don’t have good phone or computer skills. I can’t multitask or work well with others. And yet I maintain: I am not an id-i-ote.
ELAINE MAYBE
CARMEN, my best friend and writing/performing partner had joined this theater company that went to Maine for two weeks every August to work out ideas for the upcoming season. Being a native New Yorker and not someone that familiar with the woods or white people and definitely not the combination, Carmen asked if she could bring me along. I saw this as a free Maine vacation, the summer tennis camp I never had, and gladly went. I wasn’t doing much, just waitressing at this place on Montague Street called The Leaf and Bean. I don’t know if I could be described as a “good” waitress. Eleanor and her husband came in for brunch one day and there was a long line and a couple came and stood behind them and she heard the guy say, “Well, I don’t know. Why don’t you go check?” and the woman walked to the front of the café and then came back and said to her boyfriend, “Yeah, she’s working today,” and they walked out. I had a certain style. Either you got it or you didn’t.
Almost before I stepped out of the car I met this actor named Jed and became a company member of the Irondale Ensemble Project. Back in New York, I began doing the outreach work of the company, part of which was teaching acting in high schools in the Bronx and way out in Brooklyn. I also commenced being the girlfriend of the young, handsome, funny, rich, charming, talented Mr. Jed Clarke.
The guy was about as nice as they come. Nicer. Always the first one to show up for a cleanup day at his building or offer his Westphalia van to someone who needed to move. The kind of no-fuss guy who shopped for khakis at EMS on Broadway even though he was retail royalty, his great-grandfather having started the swankiest clothing store in New York. The way he saw it, EMS was around the corner, easier than going above Fourteenth Street. People who do things because they’re easy drive me nuts! Hard! Hard is what you want! That’s what makes it mean something. That’s what makes it real, dummy! His attitude toward my writing was similarly oppressive.
“I think you should do whatever makes you happy. You’re an amazing writer. You should go for it.”
Go for it. Go-for-it. I was doomed. My writing . . . doomed.
Jed’s conversation was packed with clichés. Some of his most oft-used were: now you’re cooking with gas, let’s get down to brass tacks, and there’s more than one way to skin a cat. Jed would drop them casually and I’d think, What are you doing? Jesus, keep it down, looking around to make sure no one had heard him. He was a big reader but he read so goddamn freely. This looks good. My brother gave me this, I’ll read this next. No thought about what he should be reading. He just read.
Part of my life was cohesive: waitress, member of a serious downtown theater company with a social conscience that taught AIDS education in prisons, schools, homeless shelters. We performed Brecht and Büchner. And then there was my after-work life, which involved a big loft in SoHo and fundraisers with his parents and dinner at ‘21.’
Jed and I got our food from Dean & Deluca. Deep down I knew Dean & Deluca was not a grocery store. We watched TV on his big screen. This was terrifying to me. His couch was big and comfortable. Comfort? I’ll never be a writer. He had cable. Cable! Not one word will I write. He wanted to get married. He wanted kids. I loved him a lot. We laughed constantly. But just what kind of life was this guy setting me up for? I would go to the corner every day and buy the New York Times and read it with my coffee. By that time Jed had flipped on his big TV and was watching CNN. I’d try to block out the headline scroll, the dramatic language, the