Private Lessons Ch. 05-06

"Hi."

Mr. C was bundled up in a black trench coat with scarf and gloves on.

"Hi," I said with a warm smile. It was ironic that even though I knew what he sounded like when he came, I was still not sure if I should call him by his first name or 'Sir" or "Teacher" or what.

Apparently, Mr. C was nervous too because he wasn't looking at me and seemed very quiet.

"So where are we going to have lunch?" I asked eagerly, hoping to break the ice.

He looked pained at my question. Jeez, did I fuck up already?

"But if you're not up to it, we can postpone it, that's cool..." I babbled, suddenly afraid. Very afraid.

A long silence.

"We can't keep doing this," he said simply.

"Doing what?" I asked stupidly, hoping that I was just misunderstanding him.

"Meeting this way."

Of course, it was inevitable. After all, he probably had a whole harem of women just waiting for him to call them up. Of course, he was already tired of me. Why would he want an inexperienced hick from Texas who gave bad blow jobs when he could have movie stars, models, anyone he wanted...?

Oh, yes, I expected this to happen.

What I did not expect was the pain in my chest like I had been punched in the gut. I did not expect the wild frantic scream that was fighting to rise from my throat. Call me the best actress in the world, but somehow I managed to stay cool.

"But what about...lunch?"

Mr. C closed his eyes in torment. He looked like what he was, a man horribly guilt ridden by the prospect of ripping my heart out. He could have been playing one of his romantic roles on stage,

"I shouldn't have done that," he said apologetically. "I had led you to expect...more than I can give you. And I'm sorry about that. There are lots of things that I shouldn't have done."

I am not going to cry. I am not going to cry. It was a litany in my brain.

"With me?"

"Yes."

I was swallowing hard.

"I'm sorry, Maggie. But I am really not ready for a relationship."

"Hey, I'm cool with that," I said, nodding. "Neither am I. You know, I've got auditions to go to, acting jobs to take...no time for romance."

"That's not what I saw in the hallway last week."

Oh. So that was what this was about!

"Look," I said, trying not to laugh in relief. "That guy. He was an old boyfriend of mine. He was trying to start something up again, but there's no way. He means nothing to me now, less than nothing. I have no idea why he's bothering me..."

"Who you see is none of my business."

"But I'm not seeing him!" I argued desperately.

"I took advantage of you, Maggie," he continued, not listening to me. "In the most horrible way. You were a student of mine and you looked up to me and I..."

"I still look up to you," I protested. "You've taught me so much. Just because we..."

"Please let me finish!"

Abruptly, I shut up.

"I suppose I really have no business teaching. I've never done this sort of thing before. I'm just an actor who got some lucky breaks. And...when I watched you in class, you reminded me of me. Back when I was young. The way you would look at me. From that very first day, I found you so cute...and..."

Cute. Could any other word be such an omen of doom?

"...I guess I got a bit carried away..."

I winced at the memory of clutching on to the desk as he whipped me with his belt. And when I thought of how I had posed like a stripper for him on the stool, I felt worse than pathetic.

"Yes, I guess you could say that."

There was a horrible long silence between us.

"You're so young, Maggie. All intense and optimistic and full of life. That boy you were with...he's the sort you should be with. Someone who has something to give you."

Yeah, right, I thought bitterly. Like what, besides heartburn?

"I don't have any problem with your being older. In fact, I kind of like it."

It was true. I had always fantasized about being with an older man. Maybe because my dad abandoned the family when I was only eight years old. I don't know the psychology of it. But there was something comforting about being with an older man.

"Trust me, dear, I'm no Romeo, no matter what roles I play..."

"Look, sure, I know you're no saint. Neither am I. I mean..."

"I've done some reprehensible things in my time," he continued. "I wasn't that much older than you when I sold my soul to the devil just to get some good roles on the stage. I sacrificed my home and family just to get ahead. I have an ex-wife who hates my guts, two daughters that won't speak to me. And now that I am no longer considered as young and handsome as I used to be, now that I am not longer the flavor of the month, so to speak, I have been lowered to the point of passing myself off as a teacher and taking advantage of my students. I am no better than a scam artist selling fake watches on the street. But you've taught the teacher something, Maggie. I guess I have a conscience after all."

I couldn't look at him. If I did, I would crack into a million pieces. I just stared at a used cigarette butt in a drift of dirty snow at the foot of the steps. And I really really wished that he had never discovered that he had a conscience.

"I'm sorry."

"It's okay," I shrugged.

"No, it's not."

Don't make me do this, you bastard! I thought frantically. It's bad enough that you're saying these things. Don't rub in my pain.

"I hope you will stay in the class. I think you've got a great deal of talent and potential."

The thought of the next four weeks facing me made me feel sick. But I was a professional. I could tough it out.

"Sure."

I was proud of myself. Perhaps this was the first time I had ever gone through a breakup and had not started to bawl like a baby. But then again...was this really a breakup? Had we ever started? At any rate, I had not cried. I just felt numb. Someone could have kicked the shit out of me and I wouldn't have felt a thing.

"Well, I guess I'd better go," he said.

"Okay."

"Are you going to be...?"

"Yes," I interrupted him, just wishing he would go. For the first time ever, I wanted Mr. C out of my sight. I didn't want to see that sexy face or hear that deep voice. I just wanted him to walk away while I was still numb.

I walked up the side street to the #9 train. Pulling out my Arthur Miller play, I looked at the words but they were all garbled up somehow. They weren't registering in my brain.

Walking up the four flights of stairs, I entered the Chelsea Dump, glad that my roommate was not in. I pulled off my boots, took off my coat and laid down on my bed.

And then the dams broke with a vengeance...

WEEK EIGHT - SICK DAY

If I were Marilyn Monroe, I would have groped for a bottle of pills and washed them all down with a healthy shot of Southern Comfort. If I were any Drama Queen worth her salt, I would have slit my wrists or hung myself in despair.

As it was, I was all too ordinary. I got sick with a cold.

Whenever I went through heartbreak, I tended to get sick. And not just a sniffle and a few coughs, either. Nothing as civilized as that. No, this was a horrendous and disgusting wheezing disease, complete with laryngitis. My chest hurt with every breath. My back ached from my lungs being so full of phlegm. Sleep was an utter lost cause.

And going to class on Sunday was out of the question. I guess it was just as well.

I called Dawn. We were always supposed to call the key student in the horrid event that we have to miss a sacred class.

"Dawn?" I rasped on the phone. "Hi, it's Maggie."

"Christ, Maggie! You sound awful!"

"Yes."

"Needless to say, I guess you're not going to come to class."

"There's no way I can sing. And I'll infect everybody."

"Take some Slippery Elm and drink lots of orange juice."

I asked her if I thought Mr. C would boot me out of the class.

"What? Are you kidding?! He loves you!"

Yeah, right.

"He might bark at you a little and give you a hard time, but I'm sure he will understand."

"OK."

"Get some rest."

"OK."

I hung up the phone, staring at the walls of my room in bleak hopelessness.

What to do when a person is sick and emotionally distraught at the same time?

Because I felt so rotten and uncomfortable, I was not sleeping. I was just lying there in bed, mulling over what had happened with Mr. C. Remembering the things he had said, the things I had said, all of it playing over and over like a broken record...

Normally, I would just drown myself in a classics movie marathon on Turner Classic Movies. But to watch movies, you have to have peace of mind. Otherwise, scene after scene passes; and before you know it, you have no idea what plot you are watching or who the characters are because your mind has wandered. With a book, the words start to turn into garble and make no sense. In short, there was no peace. No peace anywhere.

I reached for my bottle of Tylenol PM, hoping that maybe this time the pills would overcome the misery. At least for four to six hours.

The phone rang again.

"Hello. This is Spartan Temp Agency. May I speak with Miss Spencer?"

"Speaking."

"Hi. I just wanted to let you know that Goldman & Brothers gave us a ring. Apparently, they won't need you anymore at this point. Are you available to take a new assignment?"

"I'm sick. Can I call you in a day or so?"

"Sure thing, sweetie."

Great. Now I was dying, rejected, broke and out of a job. Could things get any worse?

As soon as I hung up from the temp agency call, the phone rang again.

Jesus Christ!

"Hello?"

"Maggie?"

Oh, God...it was Mom...

"Maggie? Is that you? You don't sound like yourself!"

"Yes. I'm sick."

"Well, I haven't heard from you in a while."

There was a reason for that. I simply had nothing to say to her. But she always liked to dwell on the negative. If I didn't call her, it meant that I didn't love her. But if I did call her, then she never hesitated to give me unwanted advice, insult me and make me feel like a huge disappointment and fuck-up. She would say that I didn't love her. That it was horrible for a daughter not to love her own mother. But the fact of the matter is that enough bitterness and negativity and criticism could destroy any loving relationship. But apparently, she was more addicted to making me feel like shit than trying to work things out.

Back when I was a kid, I could tell my mom anything. Most of the time, she would understand and be a sympathetic ear. Then once I graduated from high school, she changed. Or I changed. One of us changed. Maybe we both changed. And now, there was no comfort in confidence with my mother. If I told her about Mr. C, for example, she would not pass the Kleenex and supply a shoulder to cry on. I could practically hear the insensitive response, complete with accusatory sulkiness: As long as you keep living your life the way you do, you're never going to meet any worthwhile men. So what do you expect? Her definition of 'living your life the way you do' meaning my being an actress living in New York City and her definition of a 'worthwhile man' meaning some Prince Charming with a nice fat bank account who will marry me on the first date with no questions asked.

You see, once upon a time, before I was born, my mother had been a photographer. And a good one. If she had applied herself, she could have been very successful, I believe. She had gone from Texas to New York City on her own when she was eighteen, ready to set the world on fire. But she listened to her parents, who had guilt tripped her into essentially leaving the city and coming back to their Texas farm. She married my father, the nice young man who sat next to her in Biology Class at the University of Texas at Austin. I cannot say what they saw in each other. To this day, I have never figured it out. They never had anything in common. They never seemed to be madly in love with each other. The fact that both of them were Bible Belt virgins who didn't have a clue about birth control did not help matters. I was born exactly nine months after their wedding day.

For most of my childhood, I was admittedly a spoiled rotten brat. When I became an adult, that was when the shit hit the fan, so to speak. My parents learned that I was all too human. I became equally disillusioned about them.

During my first semester at the community college, Dad left Mom. He did not leave her for another woman. He just wanted to pursue his passions for airplanes and hunting. At the time, I called him up on the phone and said all sorts of nasty shit to him. That's because I was more or less trapped with a distraught woman who was having the temper tantrums of a 3-year-old and making me feel like killing her. And I blamed him for putting me in such a position.

As I get older, I can start to see things from his point of view. From both of their points of view, actually. They had both given up their dreams in exchange for the All American Dream. You know, the white picket fence, the cars, the kids and suburbia. Later on, they realized that their personal sacrifices were not worth the All American Dream. And when I was born, I was the glue that either held the marriage together or kept them in chains, depending on your point of view.

Which put an awful lot of pressure on me.

Yes, I had dreams of moving to New York City, even though I had very little except what money I had saved up from various part-time jobs and the clothes on my back. My mother's repeated psychodramas with dialogue from the worst written soap operas simply fueled the flames of my ambition to leave for good. And unlike my father, I had the right to leave. I wasn't married to anyone. And I was an adult.

So after college, I took off to the Big Apple. And to this day, Mom has never forgiven me for it. She would have been perfectly happy if I had become a pathetic old maid schoolteacher still living at home with her mother at the age of 40. Just the prospect of such a gruesome fate made poverty a little less hard to take.

The rest of the phone call was short and tense. I was always tense around Mom, never knowing if she was going to be sane or go off the deep end with me. It was truly a dysfunctional relationship. And always in the background were her damning words drumming in my head: You're a fuck-up...You're a fuck-up...You're a fuck-up...although a nice Southern Baptist would never swear like that.

I said I was losing my voice and really shouldn't talk anymore, cutting the conversation short.

I could tell that even that pissed her off, never mind the fact that I was fucking dying.

In some ways, my mom's call was a shot in the arm, reminding me that life might not be paradise now. But it was still a whole hell of a lot better than where I had been. After all, a 'two-ships-passing-in-the-night' encounter with Mr. C was always preferable to hearing my mother go on one of her typical five-hour bitchfests.

I took my Tylenol PM, turned on TCM and laid back on bed, listening to the legendary dialogue from CASABLANCA. As Rick left Ilsa at the plane, I promised myself that tomorrow I would go to the library and pick out a new song.

I was an artist, after all; and I knew how to use pain to my advantage.