the gays were becoming visible in the wake of the previous year’s Stonewall riot. The American musical had transitioned from Oklahoma to Hair.
But on the screen, girl-next-door Kitty Randolph was still being romanced by blandly handsome leading man Quinn Scott in a colorful, imaginary world devoid of real-world concerns. She was the new-to-the-big-city ingénue, bravely fighting the corporate structure in a San Francisco advertising agency and struggling to be taken seriously as a woman and a professional; he was the chauvinistic ad man won over by her charms and talent. They met, fought, flirted, fell in love, and, of course, sang unmemorable songs to each other.
The minor nod to female empowerment aside—already done better and more effectively by real life—the movie was an anachronistic crowd pleaser. And Kitty Randolph was no longer the fresh-faced child-woman of her early career. Now somewhere in the gray area between thirty and forty, her youthful appearance came largely courtesy of soft focus. All in all, When the Stars Come Out had the feel of desperation to it, as if the producers felt they could hold on to a past that was quickly fading away … if it had not already disappeared.
Or at least that was how Max reviewed the movie over dinner.
“Not a bad movie, but it feels like it comes from another era.”
Frieda focused on her salad, gently poking the tines of her fork into iceberg lettuce. It annoyed Max when she did that.
“They’re getting divorced, you know,” she said finally, as she humanely speared a leaf at its corner and dipped it in the salad dressing pooled at the side of her plate.
“Who?”
“Kitty Randolph and Quinn Scott.”
Max had not even known they were married in real life. For that matter, he had not even cared. Still, Kitty Randolph was America’s girl-next-door, the kind of woman who did not get divorced. Even in racy, tumultuous 1970.
“Where did you hear that?”
“I read it,” said Frieda, again gently poking her lettuce leaves. “In one of my magazines.”
Max sighed. Her damn celebrity magazines, cluttering up the apartment. He hated them almost as much as he hated watching her poke the lettuce, and almost as much as he was growing to hate Date Night…but, of course, he would not say a word.
Frieda continued. “It’s all very mysterious. No scandal, like Elizabeth Taylor and Eddie Fisher and that poor Debbie Reynolds. They just…split up. One day they were together, and the next, he was gone.”
“He walked out on her?”
“He walked out. Or so they say. I read that he’s quitting the movies and moving to Long Island or something. I think he has a house out there.”
Max immediately decided that Quinn Scott was his hero. Any man who could just walk away had to be heroic, because most men—even hard-driving fourth-year associates at major law firms, like Max—were trained to just sit back and endure it for the rest of their lives. Like Max, they would marry at twenty-six, decide it was a boring mistake at thirty, and live silently with that mistake for another forty or fifty years.
True, Quinn Scott was not just any man. He was, like his wife, an actor, although not nearly as accomplished. He was that guy who you sort of thought you knew from supporting roles in John Wayne movies or insipid comedies, which, while not superstardom, put him leagues ahead of all the actors you didn’t sort of think you knew. And for three years in the ’60s he had played the lead in television’s moderately popular crime drama Philly Cop, which certainly counted for something, if not quite immortality.
So quitting the acting business? Max would believe it when he saw it. He was probably just diminishing expectations, to better make a graceful transition back to television. And anyway, there were worse ways for a man to spend those last forty or fifty years.
“Max?” asked Frieda. “You’re so quiet. Is something wrong?”
“No,” he said, catching a sidelong glimpse of the curvaceous cocktail waitress out of the corner of his eye as she passed and wondering not about her sexual voltage, but whether she, too, poked at her salad, one lettuce leaf at a time. “Just thinking about the movie. Go finish poking your salad.”
“What?”
“Eating your salad.”
She looked at him, not quite comprehending his words but still knowing that there was something about the way she was eating her salad that annoyed him. Her first instinct was to push the salad plate away; her second instinct—the one she obeyed—was to finish the salad at her own pace. She picked up the fork and began poking.
Max was saying something, but his words weren’t registering with her. Instead, she was thinking about how fabulous it must be to walk in Kitty Randolph’s shoes. Rich, famous, and now free to live her life exclusively by her own rules. And if the world, like her husband, thought When the Stars Come Out was anachronistic, well, the heck with them. Kitty Randolph didn’t need a man, and neither did…
She felt something.
“Max,” she said, in an instant forgetting her dissatisfaction as she looked at her husband and beamed. “The baby! It kicked!”
Washington, DC, September 2005
Noah Abraham kicked, and the wastepaper basket toppled over. Balls of crumpled paper poured out and rolled across the slightly warped hardwood floor of his living room.
Damn The Project…damn The Project that was slowly but steadily frustrating him, destroying every last trace of his creativity.
Noah had months earlier stopped thinking of it quaintly as “his project.” Now it had a capital T and a capital P: The Project. It was the quintessence of a good idea gone heartbreakingly bad and, in the process, consuming him. It cost him sleep, it brought on unfamiliar frustration, it stopped his creativity dead in its tracks. In short, it was a major pain in his ass.
He didn’t consider himself a quitter, but The Project had been making him reconsider. He didn’t quit when he sank a ton of family money on a weekly community newspaper in western Massachusetts, exposed a hotbed of municipal and business corruption, then learned belatedly that weekly community newspapers depend for their survival on the goodwill and advertising dollars of municipal officials and business leaders. Yes, the paper had to close, but he hadn’t quit.
He didn’t quit when his stint at an environmental group ended after a series of unfortunate run-ins with the executive director. The woman was an egotistical, incompetent jerk, running the organization into the ground and compromising its principles. Just because the board of directors unanimously if erroneously decided that he, not the director, was the problem, thereby bringing about his abrupt severance pay–free exit from the staff, he hadn’t quit. And the fact that the executive director later took a job as a petrochemical lobbyist proved his point, in a sense. Yes, she remained on friendly terms with the not-for-profit board and had quadrupled her salary but, to Noah, it was a moral victory, and he moved on. He didn’t quit.
And then came his project, which quickly morphed into The Project, and that, well…that made him want to quit. It was dead end after dead end, a string of furtive meetings and mumbled conversations offering neither insight nor depth. It was a maddening process yielding questionable results, at best.
And, worst of all, there was no one else to blame. No corrupt politicians, no incompetent executive director…Noah Abraham had only Noah Abraham’s brainchild to blame. And his brainchild had grown into a very troublesome, morose, uncooperative, and disobedient brain-adolescent.
In his idealistic moments, he told himself he would push on, despite feelings of hopelessness and frustration. He had always moved on. He had moved on from the newspaper to the environmental group to The Project, and he would just keep moving.
But in his realistic moments, he thought, Well, what the fuck did you expect when you decided to write a book about closeted gay congressional staffers? To which his only answer was, “Seemed like a good idea at the time.”