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“When what you really want to do is throw a drink in his face, throw up on his shoes and run, it’s worth sticking around to see what happens.”
—my great aunt Fran, who sums it all up better than I ever could.
 
PROLOGUE
 
HAD I NOT JOINED Parrot for dinner that night, everything would have been different. Everything.
 
Most evenings out with Parrot are an adventure. I would love it if just once she could manage to get through dinner in a restaurant without recruiting whoever is at the next table to be the evening’s entertainment. (Was I the only one who repeatedly got the “stranger danger” lecture?) But as the adventure frequently ends in arrest or vomiting, I should have been grateful that, thus far, our impromptu meeting with a pack of self-important junior tycoons had led only to a crowded bar. A Friday night in New York City can always get so much worse.
 
River Town Lounge is a somewhat trendy downtown spot where the girls sandwich something clingy and sleeveless between overpriced jeans and hoop earrings, and the men all sport the same Banana Republic shirt. Directly after promising not to desert me, Parrot vanished into the crowd with Kirk, her new acquisition. George, the unfortunately handsome jackass with whom we’d first made contact at dinner, had perceived in me an admirable foe and was attempting to ply me with liquor while we verbally stabbed each other.
 
“So what do you do, George?” I asked.
 
“I’m in M’n’A. That’s mergers and—”
 
“Acquisitions, yeah, I know what it is.” I was grateful he didn’t say “consultant.”
 
“Of course. And you?”
 
“I’m a writer.”
 
“For whom?” he questioned.
 
“A playwright.”
 
“Ah. For no one.”
 
“Yeah, I’m having cards made.”
 
“So what kind of plays do you write?”
 
This is one of those questions I hope people will not ask in a bar, because then I’ll have to say something like “Well, right now I’m working on a piece about the perfect suburban widow and the way the neighborhood destroys her when she falls for the wrong man. It’s a little bit Ibsen, a little bit Alan Ball.” Inevitably, the other person will draw some parallel to Desperate Housewives and I’ll have to explain why that’s completely off base without sounding affected and nasty.
 
“Gee, George, I’m sure you’d much rather tell me about you. What kind of mergers do you acquire?”
 
“Point taken. So what do you actually do? For money?”
 
“I do administrative work.” I would not say the word temp to this man.
 
“You temp?”
 
I hated him.
 
“What agency? We’ve always got temps in my office.”
 
So much.
 
“It must be really hard to have a college degree and be temping.”
 
I was going to kill him.
 
“I’m assuming you did go to college. You seem like you did.”
 
“What exactly does that mean?” I asked.
 
“You know what it means. Would you like another?” He indicated my empty glass.
 
The overtly stylish bartender who was approaching had a “Hello, my name is Richard” sticker on his shirt, clearly an attempt at irony, which prompted George to cry, “Hey, Dick, another Brooklyn Lager for the lady.” Dick shot George a crushing glance and said, “It’s Richard.”
 
“I suspect that’s why it doesn’t say Dick on the tag,” I offered.
 
Kirk suddenly surfaced, adding, “Just crack this guy’s head against the bar a few times, Richard. That’ll shut him up.”
 
“Don’t bother, Richard,” I said. “His head’s so hard it probably wouldn’t do any good.”
 
Richard looked George and me up and down and said, “I have a feeling you know.”
 
George smirked. I cringed.
 
“Hey, I think your friend Parrot and I are going to head to another bar. You guys wanna tag along?” Kirk had discovered the many wonders of a newly available Parrot. I made a mental note to beat her about the head and shoulders for abandoning me on the very night I had come out to cheer her up.
 
“I’m going home,” I said.
 
“I’m going with her,” George said.
 
I didn’t have to say anything. I just looked at him.
 
Parrot materialized, kissed me goodbye, drunkenly whispered, “I’m going to fuck this Dirk guy—till he bleeds,” and staggered out the door.
 
I headed for the coat check, where George insisted on paying for me, and I rushed toward the door as quickly as possible. He was at my heels.
 
“Can I get you a cab?” he asked.
 
“I can get a cab.”
 
He smiled. “I was just suggesting—”
 
“Not looking for suggestions, thanks.” I didn’t even look back at him.
 
“Look, where are you headed? We could split—”
 
I was outside before he could finish the thought. And as I jumped into the street to hail a taxi, my heel caught on the curb and my ankle turned in the most painful, least natural way an ankle can turn. I made a loud, embarrassing, dying cat sort of noise and began to fall—when George caught me. Why, oh why, did we have to keep having this Nick and Nora, Bogie and Bacall, Turner and Hooch kind of evening? I hated this man! I did not need to have any sort of even fleeting attraction to someone who spent his life hoping that corporations would fold so he could arrange to take them over!
 
Through the haze of my extraordinary agony, I noticed that George smelled both expensive and very good as he picked me up and put me in the cab, which had shockingly stopped as I went down. And he didn’t even make that little “oof” noise that my college boyfriend used to make when he picked me up. Note to men: if you have to make the noise, we’d rather you skipped the picking-up altogether.
 
Before I could stop him, George slid into the seat beside me.
 
 
“Every glorious minute you waste thinking is a minute you could be drinking, loving, fighting or dancing. Think about that. But not for too long.”
 
CHAPTER 1
 
AS A YOUNG, struggling playwright, you have to feel grateful when anyone wants to do your work. Which was why, when a somewhat intense guy gave me a call and said he went to theatre camp with one of my college friends and he’d read one of my plays and gee, he really felt like he had a handle on it…I said I’d meet him for coffee. His name was Will Atherton. He was a second-year grad student in a highly regarded MFA program and we had agreed to meet at one of the myriad Starbucks cafes in Union Square.
 
Getting through the door was a struggle, but I pressed through the thronging caffeine addicts and took a moment to wonder how all these people had so much free time in the middle of the day. I was squeezing this meeting in on my teeny temp’s lunch break. I scanned the horde of turtlenecks hunched over iBooks, and realized I had no idea how to pick Will out. I must have looked lost and annoyed, because he spotted me within moments.
 
“You must be Liza!” a voice barked behind me. I turned to see a shortish, blondish fellow with thinning, unwashed hair and a slightly soft physique.
 
“Will?” I questioned. Obviously Will. Unfortunately, he had a turtleneck and a wallet-chain.
 
“You got it!” He laughed, though nothing was funny. He pumped my hand like he was trying to bring up oil and I tried not to decide that he’d only matriculated because his family had single-handedly endowed a third of the buildings on his campus.
 
“It’s so great to meet you!” Will gushed. He was weirdly energetic and bent over while he was talking. “I actually found a table!” he said, as though this merited congratulations.
 
“So how goes it?” he asked as we sat.
 
“Great, and you?” I replied, thinking that I really didn’t have time for small talk.
 
“Good, good,” he cooed. “I’m really juiced that you’re meeting with me.”
 
“Oh, yeah…,” I said. “So how exactly did you happen to read the play?”
 
“Oh, you know I make it a habit to read everything coming out of Yale.”
 
“Oh,” I said, thinking this was sort of odd as I’d left undergrad seven years ago.
 
“So, your work!!” Will began. “I’m really into it, really feel connected to your vision.”
 
Admittedly, I grew up around one of America’s theatrical treasures, my great aunt Fran, so I should be well-used to meaningless showbiz chatter. I went to my first Oscar ceremony when I was eight. But I’m still uncomfortable with the entertainment industry’s habitual self-congratulation. I’m not old enough to have “work.” According to Will, however, I was someone who “could really make a dent in the landscape of contemporary American theatre.”
 
“So here’s the dealy—” Will leaned in closer, and I drew my Frappuccino back a little. “I get to direct one mainstage per semester, use the undergrad actors (great kids!) and I wanna do nothing this winter if I can’t do Georgia Allen’s Window.”
 
The play in question was my pithy portrait of neighborhood politics in the suburbs, and I must admit I smiled at the thought that it might see the lights of a stage.
 
“Wow,” I said, “I’m really flattered—”
 
“You prolly wanna know, like, what I’m about: totally valid. Here’s my thing—very into the Theatre of Cruelty, Artaud, Grotowski, very physically oriented.” Visions of shrieking drama students in unitards writhed in my head.
 
Immediately I wondered why Will was drawn to my naturalistic drama, but I was trying to be open-minded. Exposure is everything. Unlike acting or dancing or wrapping the Reichstag, writing is one of the few artistic pursuits you don’t need permission to do. But if my plays weren’t being performed, I might as well stop writing them. I let Will continue and I tried to seem enthusiastic, but a small pebble of fear formed in my stomach as he explained that he wanted to add a character who moved through the audience poking people with a stick and telling them to sit up straight. He seemed to think it would strengthen the feeling of confinement within the play’s oppressive neighborhood. I tittered uneasily.
 
“Thing is, Liza,” he explained, tugging on his wallet-chain, “you have to be willing to take risks. You have to make people uncomfortable.”
 
“Hey, go with your strengths.” I mustered another laugh so he wouldn’t realize I was being a bitch.
 
“Right, right, exactly,” he replied. “So tell me what you think? Where are we? Where do we stand?”
 
I tried to phrase my answer carefully. “Gee, um…here’s the thing, Will…I’m really excited that you’re interested in the piece. It just sounds to me like you and I have very different…aesthetics. I’m not sure I see the same things in this play that you do.”
 
“But that’s great!” he cried. “That’s energy! That’s art! Conflict!” He slammed the rest of his caramel macchiato and pushed a hand through his greasy hair.
 
I wanted to say, “Sorry, I don’t think this is going to work.” But the idea of turning down an opportunity, any opportunity, made me want to go home and pore over the stack of law school brochures I keep in my desk drawer. It was just too depressing.
 
So instead I said, “I’ll want to sit in on rehearsals.”
 
“YES!” Will shouted, jumping up and knocking into the table, nearly upsetting my beverage. “That’s what I want! I want you in there! Let’s make some THEATRE!!”
 
People were looking. “Okay,” I said, very quietly. “Let’s.”