Christopher Sorrentino - Trance

And here’s Uncle Jerry again, a fresh drink in his hand.

“Nancy, I don’t know what’s worse. Your crass vulgarity or your stupid mixed metaphors.”

“Oh, Jerry!” Aunt Nancy pretends to laugh.

Jerry takes Susan by the elbow.

“So what are you doing up there in San Fran? There’s talk, you know. I happened to miss the notorious newscast, but you can believe me that plenty of people were more than happy to fill me in. The general picture that seems to be emerging is of you waving a gun around and laying an eternal curse on the powers that be.”

He rattles the cubes.

“Oh, I didn’t.”

“Well, I thought certain of my informants may have taken license.”

“What it was, I was very upset about a friend of mine who got killed.”

“The Atwood girl. General Gelina. I heard.”

The audition was for a role in Hedda Gabler. The place was like an oven. Susan wanted to ask someone to open a window, or a door, but figured that’d be just the thing to scotch the audition for her. She was mad because she’d had a quarrel with a woman in the small faltering dramatic reading group she’d formed. Why — the untalented but aggressively well-read woman had wanted to know — did Susan want to try out for a role in that sexist play about an unresponsive and frigid bitch, a play that clearly was the neurotic old Norwegian’s castration fantasy? Sure, the character was a strong woman, quote unquote, but depicted in all the ways that reassure male chauvinist pigs that a woman’s strength is a manifestation of psychosis and, above all, ultimately enfeebling sexual dysfunction. Why, Susan? Aren’t you aware, Susan? Et cetera. Susan wrapped her arms around herself in the sticky heat of the small theater. All the other actors and actresses seemed to know one another, and they greeted one another with a warm effusiveness that both struck her as phony and made her feel lonely.

There was this girl who sat slouched in a folding chair in such a way that made Susan think, at first, that she was pregnant. Something about the way her interlaced hands lay on her belly, the way she had positioned her feet on the floor. Their eyes met, and for a moment they gazed at each other. The momentary nature of the gaze abraded the disaffection Susan felt. She wanted to sustain a gaze like that. No reason not to. No reason in the world. She rose from the chair and shuffled over.

“Murder in here, huh?”

“Yeah, you said it. Beats Indiana, though. Like living in a kiln four months out of the year.”

Indiana? The accent was pure Northeast; she guessed Philly or New York. They chatted for a while. New Jersey was the actual answer. And she wasn’t pregnant.

Each auditioned. Susan was only slightly disappointed to discover that her new friend appeared to have little talent. But there was a kind of ineffable presence to her, some essential kernel of femininity that seemed at home on display. When the casting decisions were announced, Susan had scored the plum, Hedda, but Angela Atwood seemed a perfectly natural Thea.

“Neat,” said Angela.

“Yes,” said Susan with relief. “Neat.”

Susan had loved Angela. They’d enjoyed a friendship that was conspiratorial, flirtatious, confidential, inspirational, competitive, and tinted with the kind of maturity that presaged the open hopefulness that Susan thought should define her adult life. Until Angela abruptly went underground, she and Susan rang all the changes together.

It was Hedda who handled the guns in the play.

For a while they’d labored together, cocktail-waitressing at a den for Financial District pashas. Strictly grab-ass and glazed eyes studying your mandatory décolletage. The job was all about tits, finally, completely unfunny jokes about rising moons, full moons, ever land a man on those moons?; about Just lean on over and squeeze some fresh into my drink, about I see you’re having a double too, about Gimme some milk but hey, I’ll just drink it right out of the container. Hard to believe that these paragons of establishment success contrived to devote inordinately large portions of their theoretically spare leisure time to inebriation and the brutally undisguised admiration of the suggestively draped bumps on their chests. Susan’s weren’t even especially big. She and Angela could bore even hard-core feminists silly sitting there enumerating a day’s random humiliations; it would be suggested that they just quit, but that seemed, they thought, to miss the point.

Instead they organized, trying to interest their coworkers in a union. The unanimous indifference was dismal enough to prompt them to take the advice and quit. Angela proposed a “dramatic reading” of the five-page parting letter they cowrote to denounce their working conditions, their employers, and the apathy of their coworkers. They’d never really had their audience, though. Instead of upsetting people, making them flinch, they’d just provided them with another funny little Guess What Happened Today. Before they left, Angela had turned around and shouted something odd: “Death to the fascist insect that preys upon the life of the People!” Susan thought it sounded familiar though it wasn’t until after Angela had vanished into the underground that she remembered first hearing it after Marcus Foster had been shot; this “Symbionese” group had incorporated it into a communique justifying the November attack, which had killed Foster and wounded his deputy, Robert Blackburn. It also said, “Let the voice of their guns express the words of freedom,” a line Hedda Gabler might have delivered had Ibsen not restrained her.

So Angela became General Gelina, and Susan got herself another job.

“Well,” Uncle Jerry is saying, “lots of interesting events unfold when somebody gets wind of a friend’s demise. Maybe particularly if they feel like they were standing on the sidelines? Look at the death of Patroclus. Just don’t let your wrath get the better of you.”

“All I did was I offered moral support. A way of publicly stating, Do we wait till the police kill the rest of them or do we provide principled assistance now?”

“Principled assistance.” He utters the phrase as if he were pronouncing the name of a particularly interesting little wine.

Here comes Mom again.

“Susan, would you help me in the kitchen for a sec?”

On the long butcher-block island are stacks of dirty plates and glasses, the remains of a glazed ham on a platter, and half-empty serving dishes of macaroni salad, coleslaw, and string bean, onion, and bacon casserole.

“What are you two talking so intently about now?”

“Mom, he’s doing the talking. You said it yourself, he’s a little drunk.”

“He’s a big drunk. But that’s beside the point. He’s just trying to amuse himself.”

“So?”

“I don’t want him amusing himself at our expense. Everybody here thinks they know all about you, thanks to your star turn on the six o’clock news. Whatever you do, don’t give him any ammunition.” She lifts the lid of a covered dish and puts her cigarette out in something with bright paprika sprinkled over it. Aunt Nancy comes in with her granddaughter, who is crying.

“I think what we need is a Band-Aid,” she says.

“And then how about some chocolate ice cream?” asks Rose, bending and placing her hands on her knees to address the child.

Where are my grandchildren?

Outside, her father calls her over. “You eat?”

“Not yet, Dad.”

“Lose any more weight, I’ll have to give you a brick to carry, keep you from blowing away.”

Actually, Susan is feeling bloated; her period has been crawling in her direction for like two weeks, it feels like. But she accepts a plate from her father and holds it out for him to pile chicken and ribs on it. A cousin walks by, holding a weeping two-year-old awkwardly in her arms, saying, “No no no no no no.” The kids are dropping like flies. The strap of the cousin’s pocketbook slips off her shoulder, and her father rushes to help.