I’d heard about Nellie—a prodigious British playwright whose Wikipedia page said she was two months younger than I. An actor I know had performed in Nellie’s only New York production and described her as Tinker Bell or Annabel Lee—or Pattie Boyd right around when she was really fucking shit up for George Harrison. An intellectual with a penchant for deep emotional connection, drunken dancing, vintage coats slung over one shoulder.
Pictures of Nellie on the Internet revealed a pale waif with a mess of bleached hair and an outfit like a modern Joan of Arc, all pale rags and androgynous angles.
A Google search of Nellie’s name was unsatisfying. She didn’t have Twitter, a blog, or any other form of personal Internet expression. A scant web presence is so rare these days, alluring in and of itself. She was telling her story through the ancient medium of theater.
Months into my Google gumshoe work on Nellie, she appeared at a talk I was doing at the New Yorker festival. It was a hard crowd to make giggle, and they were full of self-serious questions about race and sexual politics that I answered unsteadily, tired and underprepared. Afterward I met Nellie in the green room and shook her frail hand and was surprised by how deep her voice was, like an old British man’s. Her eyes were half closed, her collar buttoned up as high as it could go. She looked like Keats or Edie Sedgwick or some other important dead artist.
“I’m such a big fan of yours,” I told her, having only ever Google-image-searched her. I had never read a word of her work, but, looking into her heart-shaped face, I wanted nothing more than to make a lasting impression. Hi, I’m Lena, I wanted her to feel, and I like theater and stoops and parties where people cry.
“Thank you, thank you,” she purred.
When I was fifteen my friend Sofia taught me her favorite trick, one that she said drove the boys crazy. She presented it like it was a complex act that required expert instruction, but really it was just sucking someone’s earlobe. She was ahead of me in the sex game, and I tried hard to act like this was something I’d gotten up to before.
It was late, and I could hear my parents’ dinner party winding down, people gathering their coats, my father prematurely washing the dishes, his way of signaling that the night was over.
Sofia was explaining to me how stupid boys are, how a few tricks could bring them to their knees in a matter of seconds. She was wearing a tight white t-shirt and stonewashed jeans that cut into the meat of her waist. She had the kind of glossy hair that was always slipping out of its ponytail and permanently reddened skin.
She demonstrated on me, on the mattress in my “office”—actually a crawl space off my bedroom where we kept crafting supplies and the litter box. I could feel the tips of her teeth and then my pulse in my vagina.
I am going to London. All alone. I haven’t been to London since age fourteen, when I was angry my mother forced me to ride a Ferris wheel and even angrier because I liked it.
Unsure of how to use this time, I decide to email Nellie, whose work I have now read and found as impressive and impenetrable as her person.
When Nellie replies, she calls me Darling Girl. I suggest tea, but she’d rather have a drink and says she’ll “come round” to pick me up at five thirty. She emails to tell me she’ll be late, then again to say that she’s early. When I find her in the lobby, she’s wearing slim leather pants and a long black coat. Her purse looks like a pirate’s treasure sack.
Our first stop is the “social club” she belongs to, down the block and underground. A wood-paneled, dusty room, low ceilings, and cigarettes smoked inside. Nellie orders red wine, so I do, too, fiddling nervously with the strings of my purse. She introduces me to various Wilde-ish characters and mentions Aristotle, Ibsen, and George Michael in one breath (that last one is her neighbor). She orders us new glasses of wine before I’m done with my first, then realizes that we’re late for our dinner reservation at J. Sheekey. She leads me through the West End by the hand, tells me this restaurant is where her parents would always take her if she’d made good grades or needed a talking-to. She tells me about secret affairs and secret passageways. She loves walking, does miles every day.