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My Real Memoir

As she passed, my friend Theo, a fellow graduate directing major, whispered, “She’s so sensuous and classy.” I hadn’t seen Dinah since last spring, but I had to agree. Theo admitted that he was tempted to ask her out, despite the fact that he was married. I urged him to check that impulse, my “liberated” 70s views notwithstanding, because I still believed in marital fidelity. But also because nothing exposes our own desires like competition.

Competition had lit a fire under teenage me when my buddy Rory dated my future love Marty. It had made me realize I might lose her before I even had her. And now? Despite my unresolved fear of going crazy, I wanted a shot at love again. Could Dinah be that shot?

She’d been in another one-act play the same night as mine the previous spring. In her free-swinging skirt, sans undergarments, she was indeed sensuous and classy. I’d talked with her in the actors’ greenroom and found her intriguingly scary, so I decided to ask her out. But then I’d disintegrated on stage, tried to drink it away, and entered the unreal world of anxiety.

Water under the bridge? No, it was more like a flood had carried away the bridge. I was still broken. But maybe it was time to build a new bridge. So the next time I saw Dinah, I thanked her for her work in a scene I’d directed, and apologized for my “weird state of mind” last spring. She rummaged through my eyes. And then, to my surprise, she invited me over.

We should have talked. But I was so keyed up, I treated it like an anonymous hook-up. Why waste time with small talk? Dinah was agitated, and ready to send me away. But then I spotted a life-size sculpture of a torso, and asked about it.

It was her, she said. An artist she regularly modeled for considered her his muse. And so he’d given her this bronze casting of her “middle.” She made a modest living at an immodest profession, posing for life drawing classes and professional artists. Intrigued, I jumped back to where we should have started: “Who you are, Dinah?”

She scanned my eyes again, and then opened her past like a long-sealed tomb. She was a year older than me, but just now finishing her bachelor’s degree. Ten years ago, as a naïve, studious teenager she’d been drawn to theatre. But then, in the middle of her first college play, she’d looked out at the audience, and thought, I don’t need this. So she’d walked out of the theatre, and the life she thought she wanted.

“I went blank!” I said. Until now I hadn’t told anyone about how my onstage meltdown had devastated me. “And everyone knew!”

She shrugged. “So what?” I’d disintegrated. She’d moved on.

Or so it seemed.

She’d lost her way, Dinah admitted. So she’d tried to reinvent herself by replacing her frog’s-eye glasses with contacts. Changing her wardrobe. Making herself an object of desire. And finally, marrying a handsome bartender who turned out to be an ugly alcoholic. “He hurled insults. I hurled them back. He threw furniture. I threw divorce papers.”

After that, she’d become sexually adventurous, trying “a little bit of everything.” But she was far from happy, and needed money. Then an artist told her she had “the body of a Greek goddess.” So she became a studio model, known not only for her figure, but for her props and poses—”it’s my theatre.”

Glancing at her torso sculpture, I thought, But she’s missing her “middle.”

Broken boy, meet broken girl.

My Real Memoir is a series. To read the next one, click here.