Perry Street, Winter of 1998
I used to babysit for Marla Whitfield when I was twenty-three, broke, and living two floors above her in a walk-up on Perry Street in the West Village. That's how I know this story, not from any magazine. I know it from the inside of that apartment, from the hallway that always smelled like somebody's pot roast on Sunday, from the radiator that clanked like a subway car every winter.
Marla wasn't famous the way people think of famous now. She was a session singer who'd had one regional hit in the eighties and spent most of her thirties doing backup vocals and jingle work, waiting for the phone to ring with something bigger. She was also, when I met her, thirty-nine years old and newly married to a man named Rourke Delaney, a stuntman turned bit-part actor who'd played a knife-wielding villain in some low-budget thriller she'd worked on as a location assistant, of all things — she wasn't even acting, she was hauling extension cords.
They met on a six-week shoot upstate in the spring of 1995. She told me once, sitting on her kitchen counter eating cereal at eleven at night because Rourke had the baby monitor and she'd finally gotten a break, that she went into that shoot with her heart in pieces over a breakup, sleeping in a Days Inn off the interstate, and that Rourke was the first person in months who made her laugh without trying.
"He played a psychopath in that movie," she said. "In real life he's the gentlest man I ever met. People don't believe me when I say that."
I believed her. I saw it. I saw him at two in the morning walking their son Wyatt around the living room in slow circles because the kid wouldn't sleep, singing him some song under his breath that wasn't a lullaby, just whatever was on the radio that week. I saw him cook eggs for Marla at six a.m. before she left for a session, no words, just a plate slid across the counter and a kiss on the top of her head.
They got married fast, for them anyway — less than a year after they met, in the winter of 1996, at a small ceremony in a Quaker meeting house on the Lower East Side, no big church, no press. Marla told me an old family friend, a preacher with a booming voice who'd known her since her backup-singer days, officiated. She wore a ring that wasn't a diamond — some antique thing shaped like two faces looking at each other, English, from the 1800s. She picked it herself out of three rings he brought her, and made him get down on one knee before she'd say yes, which cracked me up because by then I already knew she was the one running that household, not him, not really.
Wyatt was born in the fall of 1997, when Marla was forty-one and Rourke was doing more producing work than acting. I was still living upstairs then, still babysitting most Sundays, and I watched her go from a woman who used to leave for a session at midnight without blinking to a woman counting hours between feedings, staring at a baby monitor like it might explain something to her.
I didn't understand what was happening to her that first winter. Nobody around her did, not really, not the way people talk about it now. I'd come down to sit with Wyatt so she could sleep, and instead I'd find her sitting on the edge of the bed in the dark, still in yesterday's clothes, not crying exactly, just gone somewhere I couldn't follow. Rourke would meet me in the hallway on his way out to a shoot he couldn't turn down — they needed the money that month — and he'd say, "She had a rough night," like that explained it, like he didn't know what else to call it either.
It came to a head in February. I remember because the radiator had died the week before and the whole building was freezing, and Rourke picked a movie for the two of them to watch after Wyatt finally went down — some drama, and neither of them had checked what it was about — and the mother character died at the end. Marla didn't move for a long time after the credits. Then she started crying in a way I'd never heard through the floorboards before, not soft, and I came downstairs without being asked because I was scared. Rourke had the door to their bedroom shut, and I heard him on the other side of it, his voice low, saying her name over and over, not asking her to stop, just saying it like he was trying to keep hold of her from across the room. I sat in the living room with Wyatt on my lap for two hours that night, and I remember thinking, clear as anything: this is the part where people leave.
He didn't leave. He canceled the shoot the next morning — lost the job over it, she told me later — and took Wyatt to his mother's in Queens for four days so Marla could sleep and see a doctor and not have to perform being fine for anyone. When I asked her about it years afterward, over coffee on Smith Street, she said that was the closest she and Rourke ever came to not making it, not because of anything he did wrong, but because she didn't know how to let him see her that broken and he didn't know how to make her believe it was allowed. She laughed telling me about the movie part — hitting him in the arm afterward, telling him to read a description next time — but her face changed when she got to the four days in Queens, like she was back in that dark bedroom for a second.
What held them together, from what I saw after that, wasn't some grand romantic gesture. It was Rourke turning down work so he could be the one home when the touring schedule pulled Marla away for weeks. It was Marla walking away from a big arena tour offer a year or so later — I remember the exact number, the manager wanted her locked into an eighteen-city run worth what would've been about four hundred thousand dollars in fees, and she turned it down flat because Wyatt was two and she didn't want to miss two years of him growing up in exchange for one summer. It was the two of them still fighting sometimes — actual fighting, doors closing, Rourke sleeping on the pull-out in his office for a night or two — and then coming back to the kitchen table the next morning and talking it through instead of pretending nothing happened.
Wyatt grew up with a strange musical inheritance. Rourke loved obscure electronic records, imports he'd order and never explain. Marla was still Marla, belting scales in the shower loud enough that the neighbors complained twice. And Wyatt, somewhere around fourteen, decided he liked none of it and wanted a guitar and a Nirvana poster instead. Marla told me she recognized the stubbornness in him immediately — said it was like looking at herself at that age, refusing to sing the songs her own mother wanted her to sing.
I lost touch with them for a stretch in the 2000s. Different neighborhood, different life, a kid of my own eventually. But I ran into Marla two years ago at a farmer's market on Court Street, both of us older, both of us grayer, and she told me Wyatt was twenty-eight now, working as a sound engineer somewhere in Los Angeles, and that she and Rourke were still in the same apartment on Perry Street, the one with the clanking radiator, thirty years married that November.
I asked her what the secret was. People always ask that, like there's a formula. She thought about it a second, adjusting the strap of her tote bag full of tomatoes, and didn't really answer — just said something about Rourke and his terrible taste in movies, and that he still hadn't learned to check a description before he hit play.
Then she said she had to go, Rourke was waiting outside with the car, double-parked, and if she didn't hurry he'd get a ticket for the third time that month. I watched her cross Court Street, tote bag swinging, disappearing into the Saturday crowd the way anyone's mother would.
