LITMIR.BIZ

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appearances by naked people each show.

      I am in so much trouble.

      

      Barneys is the most beautiful store in the world. We have 8:30 a.m. breakfast meetings every other Saturday and I don’t even mind. The Hermès meeting made me cry. The same family is still running the business. We ate croissants and watched a video of a sunny warehouse in France where women hand rolled and hand stitched hems on all the beautiful scarves. It showed how every bag is started and finished by the same person who lovingly began cutting and dying it. Every single detail is done by hand. I worship my mother’s purses in a new light. Barneys is still run by the Pressman family too. In my orientation they told us how Barney Pressman hocked his wife’s engagement ring to open the store. We learn that Gene Pressman, Barney’s grandson, is the good-looking fashion genius responsible for opening the women’s store. All the girls in my department flirt with him. He throws a lot of parties. He is married to a former model who wears jodhpurs and looks sad all the time. Mrs. Pressman, Gene’s mother, always says, “Hello, dear” to me and it is my dream that she will pluck me like a flower from behind the counter and say, “You, little shop girl, you are different than the rest. Come with me.”

      We get a 45 percent employee discount twice a year for complete outfits. The rest of the time we get 35 percent and it doesn’t include accessories. I have three pairs of Clergerie shoes and two Gaultier suits and three Hermès scarves. The display department is the only area of the store run by someone outside the family. The person in charge is a very little man with enormous ideas. He controls everything; the way we fold scarves, the palette of the sock display, the composition of the jewelry display. Cases of merchandise arrive and we have to page the display department so they can oversee the way we arrange it. No one would dare just open a box. He orchestrates the windows along Seventh Avenue and Seven-teenth Street, which are very provocative and rapidly becoming important in the retail world. In the fall the windows are going to be decorated with live performance art. I am asked to be in one. I am totally excited. It is my first paying acting job since the TV movie I did in Canada when I was still in college—the one I thought would change my life and give me a career but actually did nothing of the sort. I tell my mother. The event is from six to nine. When I come home there is a message on my machine from her. “I saw you! I saw you in the window. It was fabulous. You were wonderful. You were funny and that hat you were wearing was so dramatic and that dance you did was sensational. I loved that dance. When did you learn to dance? I was so proud I thought I would bust. You were so funny and terrific. You are such a good dancer. Congratulations.” I press delete. I wasn’t in that window. That wasn’t me.

      

      My husband gives me one ten-dollar bill a day. I give him all my paychecks. I do not have a cash card for our account. When I say I would like my own money he says, “Don’t I buy you everything you need?” His voice sounds like his heart is breaking. “Yes,” I say, “but I have to ask permission. It’s my money too. Doesn’t that seem a little fucked up?” He also safety-pins my shirts closed so no one can see in the gap between my buttons when I lean over a display case. He agrees to couples therapy after coming home one night and finding me holding the front door knob in one hand and a suitcase in the other. The first day of therapy the therapist says, “People come to couples therapy to break up or to stay together. Why are you here?” He asks me first. I lie.

      

      I can’t stop thinking about the fifty thousand dollars my in-laws spent on our wedding versus the money my mother did not contribute. She said she would give us a down payment for a house but she had absolutely no interest in wasting money on a wedding. I felt like Debra Winger in Terms of Endearment. His family lives on Long Island. My mother is a snob. She hates Long Island. She has nothing in common with his parents. They are married and they don’t read The New Yorker and the angriest his mother ever gets at his father is to say, “Ooh, I am going to hit you with a wet noodle.” His mother is the nicest person I have ever met. She is warmth personified, softness in motion. She says yes to everyone. She can’t prioritize. Everything is equally important for her. Someone’s car broke down, someone was just diagnosed with cancer, someone needs a paper clip—she’ll be right over. Every time his father sees me he says, “Oh I could pick her up and put her in my pocket.” It is purely by rote but I blush and want to crawl into his pocket every time he says it. After we tell them we are separating he never says it again.

      Against advice from agents who won’t sign me and acting teachers who don’t get me, I cut off all my hair and do not get blond highlights. I book a commercial the following week. When the check comes I steal it so I can bankroll my escape. My husband packs my things. He decides what is fair dispensation of our wedding presents (nothing from his parents or any of their friends). He says I may leave, but I must leave behind the boxes he packed. If I still want a separation two months later I can take everything. I move in with my mother. She seems sad. I assumed she’d be happy I took my life in my own hands. That is all I have ever seen her do.

      

      I watch Matthew Broderick win a Tony Award and dedicate it to his father, who is dead. I vow to do the same. I change my name to Catherine Lloyd because when I join the unions there already is a Catherine Burns. Lloyd was my father’s first name. I don’t want to have the same last name as the rest of my family anymore. I didn’t take my husband’s name either. I am attached to no one.

      

      “Hello, Miss Bunes.” I feel a breath go through me, which is what my acting teacher at NYU always said should happen before you speak in a scene, but I am not in a scene. I am in the lobby of my mother’s building. I manage to get myself upstairs.

      “Oh Cathy. You are a grown woman. When will you get over it?” my mother says when she finds me pacing the floor like a caged animal. If I had a grenade I would throw it at her. “He’s a harmless old man now.” She is breaking the rules. She is saying things that cannot be said if we are to share the same life. I will not stay in this apartment another second. But the decision to leave is not empowering. Because I don’t know how to stay anywhere.

      

      I have done five commercials, eleven plays, and two television shows, and I still have to work at Barneys. Every morning I walk across Greenwich Avenue and have a conversation with myself

      Cathy, you can do it. It’s just eight hours. You can do it. You need money and they are paying you for your time. It is a totally fair exchange. I believe myself until I walk in the employee entrance, punch in, and am instantly overwhelmed by nausea. I can’t handle it anymore. My roommate the well-paid working actress came down the marble staircase yesterday all aglow from her ten-thousand-dollar shopping spree. I try to look at it as a challenge to be a good employee. Today I will fold all the scarves and use the brush to clean out the display case. If I really concentrate time will go by faster. It is easier to work hard than be bored, I tell myself. But I haven’t done it yet. Instead I stare into space and ignore the customers I am not in the mood to deal with. Every morning before we open I call my mother. We are getting along better since I stopped throwing up, plus I got her a really cool Prada raincoat that folds up into nothing. My discount makes me very popular.

      “Aren’t you at work?” she says. “I doubt calling me on the telephone is what they are paying you for.”

      “You know what, Mom? Don’t worry about them. They’re not losing any money, okay?” When I have auditions or a tech at the theater I still say I am going to the bathroom and punch out. But yesterday I left to go to the bathroom four times and really got on the subway and went to auditions. I am starting to feel guilty—even though I am probably saving them money because I rarely work a full eight-hour day. My new boyfriend writes speeches at the EPA for money. This is his work ethic: he hangs his coat on the back of his chair in the morning and rides his bike back home where he writes plays and takes a nap until the end of the day when he goes back to the EPA to say good night and pick up his coat. I tell him it is dishonorable. “I doubt that’s what they are paying you for,” I tell him. He tells me, “What do you care? I turn in all my work, I write the goddamn speeches. And they’re good.” I can’t tell if he reminds me more of my mother or of me. I am completely in love with

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