Page 15 of The House Across the Lake
In May, I was asked if I wanted to return to the Broadway play I’d left before going to Vermont.Shred of Doubt, it was called. About a woman who suspects her husband is trying to kill her. Spoiler alert: He is.
Marnie recommended I say no, suggesting the producers merely wanted to boost ticket sales by capitalizing on my tragedy. My mother told me to say yes, advising that work was the best thing for me.
I said yes.
Mother knows best, right?
The irony is that my performance had improved greatly. “Trauma has unlocked something in you,” the director told me, as if my husband’s death was a creative choice I’d made. I thanked him for the compliment and walked straight to the bar across the street.
By that point, I knew I was drinking too much. But I managed. I’d have two drinks in my dressing room before a performance, just to keep me loose, followed by however many I wanted after the evening show.
Within a few months, my two drinks before curtain had become three and my postshow drinking sometimes lasted all night. But I was discreet about it. I didn’t let it affect my work.
Until I showed up to the theater already drunk.
For a Wednesday matinee.
The stage manager confronted me in my dressing room, where I was applying my makeup with wildly unsteady hands.
“I can’t let you go on like this,” she said.
“Like what?” I said, pretending to be insulted. It was the best acting I’d do all day.
“Drunk off your ass.”
“I’ve played this role literally a hundred times,” I said. “I can fucking do it.”
I couldn’t fucking do it.
That was clear the moment I stepped onstage. Well,steppedisn’t the right word. Ilurchedonto the stage, swaying as if hit by hurricane winds. Then I blanked on my entrance line. Then stumbled into the nearest chair. Then slid off the chair and collapsed onto the floor in a drunken heap, which is how I stayed until two costars dragged me into the wings.
The show was halted, my understudy was brought in, and I was fired fromShred of Doubtas soon as the producers thought me sober enough to comprehend what they were telling me.
Hence the tabloids and the paparazzi and the being whisked away to a remote lake where I won’t publicly embarrass myself and where my mother can check in daily.
“You’re really not drinking, right?” my mother says.
“I’m really not drinking.” I turn to the moose on the wall, a finger to my lips, as if we’re sharing a secret. “But would you blame me if I were?”
Silence from my mother. She knows me well enough to understand that’s as much of a yes as she’s going to get.
“Where did you get it?” she finally says. “From Ricardo? I specifically told him not to—”
“It wasn’t Ricardo,” I say, leaving out how on the drive from Manhattan I had indeed begged him to stop at a liquor store. For cigarettes, I told him, even though I don’t smoke. He didn’t fall for it. “It was already here. Len and I stocked up last summer.”
It’s the truth. Sort of. We did bring a lot of booze along with us,although most of those bottles had long been emptied by the time Len died. But I’m certainly not going to tell my mother how I really got my hands on the alcohol.
She sighs. All her hopes and dreams for me dying in one long, languid exhalation.
“I don’t understand,” she says, “why you continue to do this to yourself. I know you miss Len. We all do. We loved him, too, you know.”
I do know. Len was endlessly charming, and had Lolly Fletcher cooing in the palm of his hand five minutes after they met. Marnie was the same way. They were crazy about him, and although I know his death devastated them as well, their grief is nothing compared with mine.
“It’s not the same,” I say. “You’re not being punished for grieving.”
“You were so out of control that I had to dosomething.”
“So you sent me here,” I say. “Here. Where it all happened. Did you ever stop to consider that maybe it would fuck me up even more?”
