Three Girls and their Brother

Which frankly floored all of us, even Amelia. She said, “Who?” And Mom said the name of this movie star again, we’ll just call him “Rex Wentworth” for now, although we could just as easily call him Bruce or Arnold or George. So Mom said, “Rex Wentworth,” and everybody just sat there. If that’s the sort of thing that impresses you, you had to be impressed.

Although I have to admit that even now I’m not a hundred percent clear even on why movie stars actually are such hot shit. I have spent a good deal of time thinking about this and it continues to perplex me. As far as I can tell, they don’t really do anything except parade around with machine guns or pistols shouting things like “Get in the truck!” Plus, when you check out their shenanigans when they’re not on screen, you really start to wonder. You read Rush & Molloy, or Page Six, about movie stars shoplifting and trashing hotel rooms and smacking around their girlfriends or getting blow jobs from transvestite hookers, I mean, it’s not like I’m saying there’s anything wrong with things like that, but it’s also not particularly something you have to admire. And then in the same issue you can read about how some studio handed over thirty million dollars or something, to one of these lunatics, so they can make some crazy movie that is just going to be so bad that your brain just starts to fry while you’re watching it. And these are the people we’re supposed to get all excited about, in America. I realize that I’m not saying anything particularly fresh here. But you have to wonder, over time, what the continued fascination is, you really just do.

Except that on the evening in question, all three of my sisters and my mother thought that meeting one of these guys was about the most mind-numbingly fantastic thing that had ever happened to them. They ran around like gorgeous birds, half-plumed, tossing shoes everywhere; even Amelia, who I would have sworn couldn’t give a shit about shoes. But there she was, hungrily swiping a pair of strappy taupe heels off the floor of Polly’s closet, and then acting all guilty when Polly walked in on her, having just ripped off a gold-sequined halter top from some reject pile in Daria’s room.

“Do you need these?” says Amelia, as if it’s actually possible to “need” strappy shoes with three-inch heels.

“Well, no, but you might try asking,” Polly snips. “I am asking,” snips back Amelia, to which Polly replies with the age-old witticism, “Whatever.” So Amelia shrugs, pissed about something, but who knows what, since she was the one who actually got caught stealing red-handed, and she trips away haughtily, carrying off those noteworthy spikes. On the way back to her room she passes me, as I’m sitting on the floor of the hallway and have witnessed the whole ridiculous exchange.

“What are you looking at?” she asks, in the same snippy tone. Which I’m not sure why, if you’re off to meet a movie star, and you’re stealing shoes on top of it, you have to snap at people.

“Nothing,” I said. I suppose I could have waxed poetic about how dumb it all seemed, but suddenly I just got real depressed. Not that I wanted to go with them, but not that I particularly wanted to spend another night alone channel surfing either. I was also wondering if I was going to be able to find anything to eat, as an actual dinner for me didn’t seem to be on my so-called mother’s agenda. The possibility that I might spend the evening doing schoolwork vaguely crossed my mind, as being too pathetic to be believed, while the rest of my family was off carousing with movie stars in Union Square. And that was pretty much what was going on in my head.

“So what’s your problem?” Amelia suddenly yells. I mean it. She just started to yell at me. “I mean what, really … what … you really are, you know—forget it! Just forget it!” That’s what she said, more or less. It was quite dramatic. I just stared at her, and then she turned red, threw the shoes on the floor, and went to tell Mom she wasn’t going because Philip was being an asshole about everything.

I just want to make this clear. She’s the one who was yelling. I didn’t say anything. That is exactly how it happened. You can’t make this crap up.

In any case, as per usual, Mom wasn’t too interested in Amelia’s protests. By then it was pretty clear that, for some reason, all three of them were the deal. You don’t get just two sisters at any given moment, even though Polly and Daria together are not unimpressive. What people wanted was all three. Movie stars included.

So I ended up sitting in front of the television again, totally deserted by the whole female menagerie, eating the tail end of three bags of soy chips, two cans of Diet Pepsi Twist, and an orange and a banana. And then I got bored. I mean, of course I got bored. Everybody kept deserting me and I hadn’t had a decent meal for three weeks, why shouldn’t I be bored? And then I finally got tired of channel surfing, and so then I hacked around with the PlayStation 2 for about an hour, and I murdered about seven hundred aliens, and then I got mad, all of a sudden, and I picked up a six-thousand-dollar crystal sort of thing off the coffee table and threw it at the wall, where it made a dent but didn’t actually break. Which may have been prompted by an hour’s worth of murdering aliens on the PlayStation 2, but in all honesty, I think it was more of a someone-has-to-think-about-feeding-me sort of situation.

In any case, after this impressive display of impotent teen rage, I got bored again, put on my jacket, and decided to go out and stalk my own sisters.

It’s ridiculously easy to get to Union Square from where I live. I’m a two-minute walk from the Seventh Avenue Station on Flatbush, and I picked up a Q Train right away. Then there’s only five stops between Seventh Avenue and Union Square and the W bar is right there, just off the square, half a block up from the subway station. The point being that, I got there so quickly, the whole idea that maybe stalking my own sisters wasn’t the brightest choice I could make never even occurred to me. I just spotted the bar, and walked right in.

It was hot in there. Not “hot” hot, just plain hot, like eighty degrees, the air recirculated so many times it just couldn’t recreate itself into something breathable anymore. I didn’t at first make it past the foyer, where there were like seven bachelors and bachelorettes, all of them squeezed into tight little business suits and looking like they were auditioning for one of those reality shows, where average people dress up like television stars and then pretend to be real in the most unreal circumstances some idiot at the network could cook up. So they were all squashed in there, in their great-looking suits, looking kind of uncomfortable and anxious, while this totally skinny girl in a tight black dress at a kind of mini-podium kept looking down at what might be a seating chart. Then she’d look up, and look over her shoulder at the crowded room, and then she’d sigh, and then she’d whisper to some passing person in another great suit, and then she’d laugh, carelessly, not worried at all about the sweaty crowd waiting in front of her, and then she’d look down at her seating chart again. All the bachelors and bachelorettes shifting on their tight shoes, and trying to act huffy, and it seemed to have occurred to none of them that this was, after all, a bar, not a restaurant; there is no seating, you can just shove your way into the room, push to the bar and get your own drink, can’t you? It’s a goddamned bar.

“Excuse me,” I said to the first bachelorette, and I pushed right by her. She looked pretty annoyed at this, but that’s kind of where she was even before I showed up. Anyway, I just slammed right through all of them, and went right to the podium, and said to Miss Little Black Dress, “I’m here with Rex Went-worth.”

Well. Talk about the magic words. Little BD looks at me, startled, but then she stops, and thinks for a second. But I gave her pause. I mean, I did, after all, know that Rex was there, somewhere. That meant that I was potentially somebody who she really better not throw out.

So she looked at me, suspicious but cool, you know, not too rude but not friendly either, and once again she ran her eyes up and down me fast, clearly considering what I was wearing—a pair of jeans and sneakers, a T-shirt, a flannel shirt over that, completely normal for a teenager who could give a shit, but not exactly the kind of thing you would expect for a member of a movie star’s entourage.

Just then, behind me, someone murmurs, “What’d that kid say? Rex Wentworth is here?”

Little BD gets a kind of look of panic in her eyes. She’s in a bind now. She’s got a weird cool loser in front of her, who’s just loudly running around, asking for Rex, and the word is about to get out that Rex is somewhere in some back room in her crummy overrated bar.

“He’s kind of waiting for me,” I said. “Is there a problem?”

“What’s the name?” she asks me, eyes narrowing.

“Philip Wentworth,” I tell her.

It did the job. Little BD blinked, tipped her head to one side, briefly, trying out her memory about what Rex’s family situation actually was, how many children he had out there, actually: Was it a possibility that I was Rex’s son? Was that a possibility? Maybe I’m a nephew. She is looking down at another list, totally professional, seeing if the name “Philip Wentworth” has been written down anywhere so that she doesn’t have to make a decision about anything, she can just let me in if this totally fraudulent name is anywhere at all; her brain is moving fast because she only has mere seconds to contemplate all of this before Rex will get wind that she kept his nephew/son/career-ruinous adolescent boyfriend waiting at the front door for no reason at all.

“There a problem?” I ask. “You want me to call his cell?” I reach into my pocket, pretending to have a cell. She looks up at me, very friendly, smiles. “No, of course not. Why don’t you just follow me?” And with that she swivels and strides straight back into the promised land.

Okay, this all happened in about five seconds, and while it may sound like I vaguely knew what I was doing, I was actually pulling major shit out of completely thin air. I mean, I did follow this insane woman back into the bar, and I did my best instinctively to slouch and shrug and look around, bored as shit, but frankly the whole performance was a complete joke, because I was in truth utterly clueless. Little BD had hauled out of a pocket somewhere—where, I will never know, because that dress was too small to hide so much as a BIC pen—one of those giant walkie-talkie things that military personnel use when they’re in the middle of the desert trying to coordinate some sort of crack offensive. And then she started murmuring with a kind of discreet determination into the speaker, “Hi, it’s Shelly. I have someone here who claims to …” I was sort of slouching along behind her, acting like this was totally protocol, I was used to babes in black dresses talking in walkie-talkies and checking me out with the security team that constantly surrounds my putative father the movie star. Meanwhile of course I was more or less in a total state of interior panic. I mean, it did suddenly occur to me that I was now not actually stalking my sisters; in actuality, what I was now doing was stalking a movie star. And that’s the kind of peculiar behavior in actuality which gets people tossed in prison.

So now I’m glancing around with casual desperation, wondering what bright idea is out there for me to just glom my brainless self onto, to get myself out of this, now that I’m in it, and Little BD is watching me carefully, as she snakes through the restaurant, and it is kind of occurring to me that in fact she never bought one bit of any of it, she’s heading for some sort of back hallway, at the end of which there seems to be a kind of sinister back office, where three massive security-looking guys are clustered around a door, staring at the kid who is about to spend the next six months in juvie. I mean, these guys were not amused, and they were not kidding, either. The true insanity of what I was doing sank in. I stopped. Shelly kept going. The security gorillas all took a step forward, seeing quite clearly that I had decided to bolt in the opposite direction and make a terrible scene crashing back through the overdressed bachelors and bachelorettes, all clustered together in their misery. I mean, things were about to get way worse, when behind me someone yells, “Philip! Hey, Philip!”

The teeny little black dress in front of me stiffens as Shelly hears this, but, as she’s swiveling, Amelia’s already got her hands on my arm, and she’s yanking me back into the bar. “Where are you going? There’s nothing back there but offices,” she tells me. Shelly, suddenly confused again, steps forward. “I’m sorry, do you know this person?”

“Yes, he’s with us, with Rex, I mean,” Amelia says, matter of factly. “Come on, come on, I’m so glad you’re here, this is such a huge bore, it’s hilarious that you came, what are you wearing, Mom is going to throw a fit …” Shelly and the giant security guys all relaxed and kind of grinned at each other; it’s amazing what a pretty girl can achieve, without even trying.

So next thing I know Amelia has me by the arm, and she’s dragging me back into the throngs of bachelors and bachelorettes, hopping a little every now and then, because she’s so short, and she seems to be looking for somebody. “Come on, I’ll get you a drink. Do you see a waiter with like kind of blue stuff in his hair? He’s our waiter, you just tell him what you want and he brings it. Like anything. You just say, I’ll have like a mango margarita and they bring it to you. I had one but I drank it too fast and I got one of those headaches in your nose. Can you believe that? Like is it not even noticeable to anybody that I’m, like, fourteen years old? And they’re serving me margaritas? This is so stupid. Maybe now that you’re here, Mom’ll let me go home, I have so much homework to do. Hi, can we get another mango margarita?” She found the waiter with the blue hair, who was at the bar receiving thousands of drinks from about four bartenders. “Sure, absolutely, not a problem,” says blue hair, and he turns back, calling suavely, “I need another Em Em.”

Amelia grabs me by the arm and pulls me in the opposite direction now, still yakking. “Can you believe that?” she says, without even looking back. “So now they’re giving out total alcoholic beverages to total teenagers, it’s pathetic, someone should report these people. Rex is a complete drip, it’s hilarious, you have to come meet him, what a jerk. How old do you think he is, forty or something? He’s like got his hand down Polly’s pants, I’m not kidding. What a sleezeball.” And she shoves me into another room.

And there, sitting straight across the room, lit by moody little tubes of something approximating light, is Rex. Even in the dark you can tell that he has a tan, and he’s leaning back on this big slick banquette, with six or seven people lounging around him, looking like Henry the Eighth, with one arm stretched out along the back of the banquette, and the other arm around Polly, his hand discreetly stuck down the back of her pants. It was spooky, really; he looked just like he looks in the movies, where he’s always waving a giant weapon around and screaming, “Get in the truck!” But he had no weapon, and he looked real little. That’s something I never considered when I thought about meeting movie stars … usually, when you see them? They’re like four stories tall, on some giant movie screen somewhere. But when you meet them, in person? They’re actually just sort of people-sized. Which makes the whole experience kind of surreal, if you haven’t thought about things like that ahead of time. Plus, if the guy has his hand down your sister’s pants, he looks significantly less like a movie star, and more like your average piece of shit asshole.

Not that Polly seemed to mind. She was leaning in and telling him some sort of secret, it looked like, and he grinned at whatever it was she said, not like it was earth-shattering, but like it was a good minor joke, and he was enough of a mensch to give a small smile to this pretty girl less than half his age, while he meanwhile had his hand down her pants. He didn’t actually look at her, but he was conscious enough of the social protocols that it was a definite smile. Mom, sitting across from the banquette, was deep in consultation with an enormous woman who was wearing something that looked like a giant green sack. She also had this major bead thing going on, strings and strings of them, big stone-like things, and crystals hanging off silver chains. She was seriously the only person in the room dressed worse than me, but Mom was hanging on her every word.

“Daria’s pissed because Polly got to sit next to Rex,” Amelia narrated. “She clearly doesn’t know about the hand down the pants part of the deal. He tried it on me, and I shoved my elbow in his stomach. Then I acted like it was an accident so he couldn’t get mad. What a creep. His last movie sucked anyway, I don’t know why people think he’s so hot. He smells, too: I think he went to the gym and then didn’t take a shower. Isn’t that gross? Plus all those guys who hang out with him? They’re like total morons. I told Mom I wanted to go home like an hour ago—she keeps ignoring me. She thinks he’s so great, she should try sitting next to him. I thought meeting a movie star would be cool but it is so totally no fun. How’d you get here, the subway? Let’s go home.”

“You think I could get some food first?” I really was hungry by this point, plus now that I had made it past all the different levels of security and screeners and fact checkers into the inner sanctum, I didn’t want to just turn around and go home. Besides which, standing around and holding a huge drink in front of a bunch of adults who couldn’t have cared less really does have a kind of weird thrill. Unfortunately, Amelia didn’t have to fight her way in there past the gate keepers; she wasn’t hungry and she was really bored. “We can go get some pizza,” she said. “Come on. I got homework to do. I have a chemistry test tomorrow.”

“Who’s the lady in the green tent?” I asked.

“Philip, who cares? These people are creeps. I’m not kidding. This is no fun. We have to get out of here.”

“You want to leave, and not tell Mom?”

“We’ll tell one of the waiters to tell her. Or call her cell from the street. Come on. She won’t care.”

But a waiter with a giant sort of pu-pu platter of appetizers was heading across the room, toward the near end of the banquette, where the lady in the green tent and Mom were deep in consultation. “I’ve been eating pizza all week,” I said. In retrospect, I wish I had just done whatever Amelia said. That is generally what I think about life anyway: Just do what the fourteen-year-old tells you, you know she’s right. But I was hungry, and no one ever invited me to hang out with a movie star before. I wanted some pu-pu platter.

“Hey, Mom,” I said, sliding into the chair next to her. Behind me, Amelia was hopping up and down, nervous. I pretended I didn’t see her while I eyed the Chinese appetizers and bolted my margarita.

“Philip,” Mom observed. “I’m surprised to see you, darling.”

“Who’s this?” said the woman in the tent, smiling. “Your son? You didn’t tell me you had a son.” This woman, whoever she was, had an incredible voice, musical and light, every syllable perfectly modulated with amusement and kindliness and intelligence. No kidding, it was startling, to hear this beautiful voice come out of a woman wearing a green tent, so I may have stared.

“His name is Philip,” said Amelia. “He’s come to take me home.”

“Philip!” smiled the green ogress. “I’m Maureen. I’m Rex’s producer.” It was hard to see her face in the weird light, but her crystals and beads sparkled on her massive chest. The beads in particular were quite distracting, they were enormous, egg-sized pieces of amber, six or seven strands of them. The whole look was puzzling and a little magical.

“It’s really nice to meet you,” I said. “Um, can I have one of those?” I pointed to the pu-pu platter, which looked unbelievably delicious—golden egg rolls piled neatly on top of each other, little meats on little sticks, plump little dumplings. I can still remember the way it smelled, that’s how hungry I was. My mouth was actually starting to water, so before anyone could say no, that’s for Rex, I just grabbed some food with my fingers, and stuffed it into my mouth. It tasted delicious.

“Philip, please,” said Mom, handing me a napkin. Maureen the giant laughed, a beautiful bell of a laugh.

“Boys,” said Maureen. “They’re different from girls.”

“Oh yes,” said Mom. I thought, if this is the quality of the evening’s conversation, no wonder Amelia is ready to bolt. But then Mom said, “Philip loves Kafka. Tell Philip about your great-grandmother, Maureen. Philip, you’ll find this interesting.”

Now, I can’t remember the last time my mother worried about me finding anything interesting, and I also can’t remember the last time my mother was interested in the works of Franz Kafka, so I knew immediately that this remarkable statement was for Maureen’s benefit. But as long as they’d let me keep eating, I was more than willing to play along.

“Sure, Kafka’s great,” I said. “I wrote a paper on The Castle last month, for AP English.”

“He’s our deep thinker,” Mom cooed.

“The heir apparent to, what was his name?” asked the ogress. She seemingly was not one of the people who cared about “The Terror of the New.”

“Leo, Leo Heller,” Mom smiled, gracefully dancing over the intellectual faux pas. Then she came out with a doozy. “Maureen’s grandmother was Kafka’s daughter!” she cried. “Franz Kafka was her great-grandfather. Can you imagine? Isn’t that incredible?” She was all proud and giddy. Because I actually am the grandchild of a minor literary figure, or a majorly minor one at least, I do have some inkling of what it might be like to have a famous writer lurking in your pedigree somewhere. But, frankly, I was more than a little confused by all of this.

“Really?” I said, trying to sound impressed rather than incredulous. “Wow. Because, wow, I read, you know, that he died kind of, didn’t he die, did he have kids? I didn’t know that.”

“My great-grandmother was a prostitute,” Maureen said, with great dignity. “Most young girls of a certain class were, in Prague, at the turn of the century. Kafka was quite taken with her for a time.”

“Wow,” I said.

Exuberantly interested, suddenly, in Franz Kafka, my mother picked up the narrative thread of Maureen’s saga. “He used to talk to her all the time about coming to America,” Mom announced. “He wrote a novel about it, he was writing it, I mean—is that right?”

Mom looked to Maureen, who nodded benignly. “Yes, he was writing Amerika, he spoke to her about it all the time. She was full of his stories. When she became pregnant, she knew what she had to do. She didn’t want to stay in Prague, there was nothing for her and her child there, it was a prison. And he could do nothing for her if she stayed. No one knew, of course, that he would soon be hailed as one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. He had no money, he lived with his parents, you know the whole story.”

“Oh yeah,” I said.

“Philip, come on,” whispered Amelia. She had no interest in Franz Kafka; at Garfield Lincoln, you don’t do Kafka until your junior year. “We got to go.”

I was still eating, though. “So they just came here. Wow. Huh. And then what happened?”

“Oh, it wasn’t until long after that they realized,” said Maureen. “In the thirties, it wasn’t until then that my grandmother, and my great-grandmother, realized who Kafka was. My grandmother was a young woman, living in New York City, she came home one day from a café, where she had been meeting friends, and she had a copy of one of his books! Someone had given her a copy of The Trial, and she brought it home with her, and my great-grandmother saw his name, right there on the cover of the book, and she looked at my grandmother and said where did you get that? And my grandmother saw how upset she was and so she said why, what’s the matter? What’s the matter, Mama? And she told her. She was so stunned she just came right out and said it, she said, that man is your father.”