By opening night, we were a couple. Even the theater critic at The Daily Orange, known for being stingy with his compliments, praised our “palpable heat” as one of the best parts of the production, lamenting that Stella and Stanley didn’t share a similar fire. To celebrate the review, we made love. It was my first time, and he said he wished it had been his, too.
Lewis and I became inseparable. We eschewed parties and bar scenes, spending most of our time alone or with a small group of fellow actor friends. We took the same classes, auditioned for the same plays, and spent every night in his bed or mine. We were too young to think about marriage, neither of us particularly aspiring to a traditional life anyway, but we talked about the future, what would happen after graduation—whether we would work in television or theater or film, whether we should move to New York City or Los Angeles. Maybe one of us would make it big and become a splashy commercial success—but that wasn’t really our goal. The only thing that mattered was that we were doing what we loved and that we were together.
I was almost happy, as close as I could come given what I’d lost, and for months, everything seemed easy, the effect of true love. Until everything felt complicated—the effect of falling out of love. The unraveling began in the fall of our senior year, when we both auditioned for As You Like It. Lewis landed the part of Jaques. A gorgeous blonde named Poppy scored the lead of Rosalind. And I got the insulting role of Audrey, a country bumpkinette goatherder. Lewis and I had never had a competitive dynamic in our relationship, but I found myself feeling insecure, resentful, and jealous, especially of Poppy, whom he seemed to worship.
I developed a mild eating disorder and began to self-loathe and second-guess. I questioned my future as an actor. I wasn’t pretty enough, I wasn’t talented enough, and I clearly didn’t have a thick enough skin. When I confided my reservations to my parents, they both seemed relieved. They said acting had been a good experience but encouraged me to find a more practical profession. My mom said I could always do community theater on the side, and my dad mentioned law school. A trial attorney himself, he pointed out that lawyering was just a different kind of performing. I didn’t buy it, but I enrolled in an LSAT prep class and began to research law schools, telling myself it was good to have a backup plan.
Always a bit sanctimonious, Lewis was appalled, accusing me of selling out. I retorted that that was easy for him to say; his parents were bohemian Brooklynites. In other words, he could follow his heart without killing his parents’ dreams. Things became more and more strained between us, and our sex, once passionate, turned mechanical.
That Christmas break, just after the one-year anniversary of Daniel’s death, my parents sat Josie and me down in our kitchen and announced that they were splitting up—their euphemism for divorce. I knew things had been rocky, and that my dad was drinking again, but I still felt blindsided, devastated by this second huge blow to our family. Without my big brother and the mooring of my parents’ marriage, it was as if I no longer had a family at all.
I had even less than that, in fact, because as soon as I returned to school, Lewis officially dumped me for Poppy. He confessed that they had been together since Thanksgiving break, but that he couldn’t bear to break my heart before December 22.
“I know how hard that first anniversary is,” he said.
“Gee, thanks,” I said, doing everything I could not to cry. “That was very big of you.”
—
MY FINAL SEMESTER of college was brutal. I quit acting altogether and fell into a paralyzing depression, the loss of Lewis and my brother hitting me at once. It was as if our obsessive relationship the year prior had simply delayed my true grieving process, and I was back to square one, my mother just waking me up from a sound sleep to tell me Daniel was dead. A professor who noticed my alarming loss of weight and slipping grades insisted that I see a university shrink. Therapy and drugs barely kept me afloat.
The only bright spot came that spring when my acceptance letters rolled in from law schools, including one from Columbia. It wasn’t Harvard or Yale, and law school was a far cry from neurosurgery, but it was still the Ivy League, and I knew my news made my parents proud. This, in turn, filled me with pride, which was better than being completely empty.