Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  Ann muttered “Thank you” and flushed a mottled maroon. Barbara took my arm, and we walked down the side aisle and out of the theater. She walked carefully, choosing her steps, her head high and lips together and solemn, like a woman on her way to a public burning.

  I wish I could say that my quixotic gesture had an immediate and disastrous effect on Whitten’s plans, that he came to his artistic senses—and went back to Shaw’s Saint Joan. But of course he did no such thing. Other financial backing than mine proved to be readily available. Contracts were rewritten, agents placated, lawsuits avoided. Cosgriff did indeed consent to write the script, and Variety became distressingly eager to report any tidbit connected with what was being billed as JOAN OF ARC: WITH THE ORIGINAL CAST! It was a dull theater season in New York. Nothing currently running gripped the public imagination like this as-yet-unwritten play. Whitten, adroitly fanning the flames, gave out very few factual details.

  Barbara remained silent on the whole subject. Business was keeping me away from New York a great deal. Gorer-Redding Solar was installing a new plant in Bogota, and I would spend whole weeks trying to untangle the lush foliage of bribes, kickbacks, nepotism, pride, religion, and manana that is business in South America. But whenever I was in New York, I spent time with Barbara. She would not discuss Whitten’s play, warning me away from the subject with the tactful withdrawal of an estate owner discouraging trespassing without hurting local feelings. I admired her tact and her refusal to whine, but at the same time I felt vaguely impatient. She was keeping me at arm’s length. She was doing it beautifully, but arm’s length was not where I wanted to be.

  I do not assume that intimacy must be based on a mutual display of sores. I applaud the public illusion of control and well-being as a civilized achievement. However, I knew Barbara well enough to know that under her illusion of well-being she must be hurt and a little afraid. No decent scripts had been offered her, and the columnists had not been kind over the loss of Saint Joan. Barbara had been too aloof, too self-possessed for them to show any compassion now. Press sympathy for a humiliated celebrity is in direct proportion to the anguished copy previously supplied.

  Then one hot night in August I arrived at Barbara’s apartment for dinner. Lying on a hall table was a script:

  A MAID OF DOMREMY

  By

  Lawrence Cosgriff

  Incredulous, I picked it up and leafed through it. When I looked up, Barbara was standing in the doorway, holding two goblets of wine.

  “Hello, Austin. Did you have a good flight?”

  “Barbara—what is this?” I asked, stupidly.

  She crossed the hall and handed me one of the goblets. “It’s Lawrence’s play about Joan of Arc.”

  “I see that. But what is it doing here?”

  She didn’t answer me immediately. She looked beautiful, every illusion seeming completely natural: the straight, heavy silk of her artfully cut gown, the flawless makeup, the hair cut in precise lines to curve over one cheek. Without warning, I was irritated by all of it. Illusions. Arm’s length.

  “Austin, why don’t you consider backing Gregory’s play?”

  “Why on earth should I?”

  “Because you really could make quite a lot of money on it.”

  “I could make quite a lot of money backing auto gladiators. I don’t do that, either.”

  She smiled, acknowledging the thrust. I still did not know how the conversation had become a duel.

  “Are you hungry? There are canapés in the living room. Dinner won’t be ready for a while yet.”

  “I’m not hungry. Barbara, why do you want me to back Whitten’s play?”

  “I don’t want you to, if you don’t wish to. Come in and sit down. I’m hungry. I only thought you might want to back the play. It’s splendid.” She looked at me steadily over the rim of her goblet. “It’s the best new script I’ve seen in years. It’s subtle, complex, moving—much better even than his last two. It’s going to replace Shaw’s play as the best we have about Joan. And on the subject of victimization by a world the main character doesn’t understand, it’s better than Streetcar or Joy

  Ride. A hundred years from now this play will still be performed regularly, and well.”

  “It’s not like you to be so extravagant with your praise.”

  “No, it’s not.”

  “And you want me to finance the play for the reflected glory?”

  “For the satisfaction. And,” she added quietly, but firmly, “because I’ve accepted a bit part in it.”

  I stared at her. Last week a major columnist had headlined: FALLEN STAR LANDS ON HER PRIDE.

  “It’s a very small role. Yolande of Aragon, the Dauphin’s mother-in-law. She intrigued on the Dauphin’s behalf when he was struggling to be crowned. I have only one scene, but it has possibilities.”

  “For you? What does it have possibilities of—being smirked at by that little schemer in your role? Did you read how much her agent is holding Whitten up for? No wonder he could use more backers.”

  “You would get it back. But that’s not the question, Austin, is it? Why do you object to my taking this part? It’s not like you to object to my choice of roles.”

  “I’m upset because I don’t want you to be hurt, and I think you are. I think you’ll be hurt even more if you play this Yolande with Miss Ann Friedland as Joan, and I don’t want to see it, because I love you.”

  “I know you do, Austin.” She smiled warmly and touched my cheek. It was a perfect Barbara Bishop gesture: sincere, graceful, and complete in itself—so complete that it promised nothing more than what it was, led on to nothing else. It cut off communication as effectively as a blow—or, rather, more effectively, since a blow can be answered in kind. I slammed my glass on the table and stood up. Once up, however, I had nothing to say and so stood there feeling ridiculous. What did I want to say? What did I want from her that I did not already have?

  “I wish,” I said slowly, “that you were not always acting.” She looked at me steadily I knew the look. She was waiting: for retraction or amendment or amplification. And of course she was right to expect any, or all, of those things. What I had said was inaccurate. She was not acting. What she did was something subtly different. She behaved with the gestures and attitudes and behaviors of the world as she believed it ought to be, a place of generous and rational individuals with enough sheer style to create events in their own image. That people’s behavior was in fact often uncivilized, cowardly, and petty she of course knew; she was not stupid. Hers was a deliberate, controlled choice: to ignore the pettiness and to grant to all of us—actors, audience, press, Whitten, Ann Friedland, me, herself—the illusion of having the most admirable motives conceivable.

  It seemed to me that this was praiseworthy, even “civilized,” in the best sense of that much-abused word.

  Why, then, did it make me feel so lonely?

  Barbara was still waiting. “Forgive me; I misspoke. I don’t mean that you are always acting. I mean—I mean that I’m concerned for you. Standing for a curtain call at the back of the stage while that girl, that chance reincarnation . . .” Suddenly a new idea occurred to me. “Or do you think that she won’t be able to do the part and you will be asked to take over for her?”

  “No!”

  “But if Ann Friedland can’t—”

  “No! I will never play Joan in A Maid of Domremy!”

  “Why not?”

  She finished her wine. Under the expensive gown her breasts heaved. “I had no business even taking the part in Shaw’s Joan. I am forty-five years old, and Joan is seventeen. But at least there—at least Shaw’s Joan was not really a victim. I will not play her as a pitiful victim.”

  “Come on, Barbara. You’ve played Blanche DuBois, and Ophelia, and Jessie Kane. They’re all victims.”

  “I won’t play Joan in A Maid of Domremy!”

  I saw that she meant it, that even while she admired the play, she was repelled by it in some fundamental w
ay I did not understand. I sat down again on the sofa and put my arms around her. Instantly she was Barbara Bishop again, smiling with rueful mockery at both her own violence and my melodrama, drawing us together in a covenant too generous for quarreling.

  “Look at us, Austin—actually discussing that tired old cliché, the understudy who goes on for the fading star. But I’m not her understudy, and she can hardly fade before she’s even bloomed! Really, we’re too ridiculous. I’m sorry, love, I didn’t mean to snap at you like that. Shall we have dinner now?”

  I stood up and pulled her next to me. She came gracefully, still smiling, the light sliding over her dark hair, and followed me to her bedroom. The sex was very good, as it always was. But afterward, lying with her head warm on my shoulder, I was still baffled by something in her I could not understand. Was it because of ESIR? I had thought that before. What was it like to have knowledge of those hundreds of other lives you had once lived? I would never know. Were the exotic types I met in the theater so different, so less easily understood, because they had “creative temperament” (whatever that was) or because of ESIR? I would probably never know that, either, nor how much of Barbara was what she was here, now, and how much was subtle reaction to all the other things she knew she had been. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.

  Long after Barbara fell asleep, I lay awake in the soft darkness, listening to the night sounds of New York beyond the window and to something else beyond those, some large silence where my own ESIR memories might have been.

  Whitten banned everyone but actors and tech crew from rehearsals of A Maid of Domremy: press, relatives, backers, irate friends. Only because the play had seized the imagination of the public—or at least that small portion of the public that goes to the theater—could his move succeed. The financial angels went along cheerfully with their own banning, secure in the presale ticket figures that the play would make money even without their personal supervision.

  Another director, casting for a production of Hamlet, suddenly claimed to have discovered the reincarnation of Shakespeare. For a week Broadway was a laser of rumors and speculations. Then the credentials of the two historians verifying the ESIR were discovered by a gleeful press to have been faked. The director, producer, historians, and ersatz Shakespeare were instantly unavailable for comment.

  The central computer of the AM A was tapped into. For two days executives with private face-lifts and politicians with private accident records and teachers with private drug-abuse histories held their collective breaths, cursing softly under them. The AM A issued a statement that only ESIR records had been pirated, and the scandal was generally forgotten in the central part of the country and generally intensified on both coasts. Wild reports were issued, contradicted, confirmed, and disproved, all in a few hours. An actor who remembered being King Arthur had been discovered and was going to star in the true story of the Round Table. Euripides was living in Boston and would appear there in his own play Medea. The computer verified that ESIR actually had uncovered Helen of Troy, and the press stampeded out to Bowling Green, Ohio, where it was discovered that the person who remembered being Helen of Troy was a male, bald, sixty-eight-year-old professor emeritus in the history department. He was writing a massive scholarly study of the Trojan War, and he bitterly resented the “cheap publicity of the popular press.”

  “The whole thing is becoming a circus,” Barbara grumbled. Her shirt was loose at the breasts, and her pants gaped at the waist. She had lost weight and color.

  “And this, too, shall pass,” I told her. “Think of when ESIR was first introduced. A few years of wild quakes all over society, and then everyone adjusted. This is just the aftershock on the theater.”

  “I don’t especially like standing directly on the fault line.”

  “How are rehearsals going?”

  “About the same,” she said, her eyes hooded. Since she never spoke of the play at all, I didn’t know what “about the same” would be the same as.

  “Barbara, what are you waiting for?”

  “Waiting for?”

  “Constantly now you have that look of waiting, frowning to yourself, looking as if you’re scrutinizing something. Something only you can see.”

  “Austin, how ridiculous! What I’m looking at is all too public: opening night for the play.”

  “And what do you see?”

  She was silent for a long time. “I don’t know.”

  “What don’t you know, love?”

  “I don’t know.” She laughed, an abrupt, opaque sound like the sudden drawing of a curtain. “It’s silly, isn’t it? Not knowing what I don’t know. A tautology, almost.”

  “Barbara, marry me. We’ll go away for a weekend and get married, like two children. This weekend.”

  “I thought you had to fly back to Bogota this weekend.”

  “I do. But you could come with me. There is a world outside New York, you know. It isn’t simply all one vast out-of-town tryout.”

  “I do thank you, Austin, you know that. But I can’t leave right now; I do have to work on my part. There are still things I don’t trust.”

  “Such as what?”

  “Me,” she said lightly, and would say no more. Meanwhile the hoopla went on. A professor of history at Berkeley who had just finished a—now probably erroneous—dissertation on Joan of Arc tried various legal ploys to sue Ann Friedland on the grounds that she “undercut his means of livelihood.” A group called the Catholic Coalition to Clear the Inquisition published in four major newspapers an appeal to Ann Friedland to come forward and declare the fairness of the church at Joan of Arc’s heresy trial. Each of the ads cost a fantastic sum. But Ann did not reply; she was preserving to the press a silence as complete as Barbara’s to me. I think this is why I didn’t press Barbara more closely about her rehearsals. I wanted to appear as different from the rest of the world as possible—an analogy probably no one made except me. Men in love are ludicrous.

  Interest in Ann Friedland was not dispelled by her silence. People merely claiming to be a notable figure from the past was growing stale. For years people had been claiming to be Jesus Christ or Muhammad or Judas; all had been disproved, and the glamour evaporated. But now a famous name had not only been verified, it was going to be showcased in an enterprise that carried the risk of losing huge sums of money, several professional reputations, and months of secret work. The public was delighted. Ann Friedland quickly became a household name.

  She was going to marry the widowed King Charles of England. She was going to lead a revival of Catholicism and was being considered for the position of first female pope. She was a drug addict, a Mormon, pregnant, mad, in love, clairvoyant, ten years old, extraterrestrial. She was refusing to go on opening night. Gregory Whitten was going to let her improvise the part opening night. Rehearsals were a disaster, and Barbara Bishop would play the part opening night.

  Not even to this last did Barbara offer a comment. Also silent were the reputable papers, the serious theater critics, the men and women who control the money that controls Broadway. They, too, were waiting.

  We all waited.

  The week that A Maid in Domremy was to open in New York I was still in Bogota. I had come down with a low-grade fever, which in the press of work I chose to ignore. By Saturday I had a temperature of one hundred four degrees and a headache no medication could touch. I saw everything through slow, pastel-colored swirls. My arms and legs felt lit with a dry, papery fire that danced up and down from shoulder to wrist, ankle to hip, up and down, wrist to shoulder. I knew I should go to a hospital, but I did not. The opening was that night.

  On the plane to New York I slept, dreaming of Barbara in the middle of a vast solar battery. I circled the outside, calling to her desperately. Unaware, she sat reading a script amid the circuits and storage cells, until the fires of the sun burst out all around her and people she had known from other lives danced maniacally in the flames.

  At my apartment I took more pills and a cold
shower, then tried to phone Barbara. She had already left for makeup call. I dressed and caught a copter to the theater, sleeping fitfully on the short trip, and then I was in the theater, surrounded by first-nighters who did not know I was breathing contagion on all of them, and who floated around me like pale cutouts in diamonds, furs, and nauseating perfume. I could not remember walking from the copter, producing my ticket, or being escorted to my seat. The curtain swirled sickeningly, and I closed my eyes until I realized that it was not my fever that caused the swirls: The curtain was rising. Had the house lights dimmed? I couldn’t remember anything. Dry fire danced over me, shoulder to wrist, ankle to hip.

  Barbara, cloaked, entered stage left. I had not realized that her scene opened the play. She carried a massive candle across the stage, bent over a wooden table, and lit two more candles from the large one, all with the taut, economical movements of great anger held fiercely in check. Before the audience heard her speak, before they clearly saw her face, they had been told that Yolande was furious, not used to being so, and fully capable of controlling her own anger.

  “Mary! Where are you sulking now, Mary?” Barbara said. She straightened and drew back her hood. Her voice was low, yet every woman named Mary in the audience started guiltily. Onstage Mary of Anjou, consort of the uncrowned Dauphin of France, crept sullenly from behind a tapestry, facing her mother like a whipped dog.

  “Here I am, for all the good it will do you, or anyone,” she whined, looking at her own feet. Barbara’s motionless silence was eloquent with contempt; Mary burst out with her first impassioned monologue against the Dauphin and Joan; the play was launched. It was a strong, smooth beginning, fueled by the conviction of Barbara’s portrait of the terrifying Yolande. As the scene unfolded, the portrait became even stronger, so that I forgot both my feverish limbs and my concern for Barbara. There were no limbs, no Barbara, no theater. There was only a room in fifteenth-century France, sticky with blood shed for what to us were illusions: absolute good and absolute evil. Cosgriff was exploring the capacities in such illusions for heroism, for degradation, for nobility beyond what the audience’s beliefs, saner and more temperate, could allow. Yolande and Mary and the Dauphin loved and hated and gambled and killed with every fiber of their elemental beings, and not a sound rose from the audience until Barbara delivered her final speech and exited stage right. For a moment the audience sat still, bewildered—not by what had happened onstage, but by the unwelcome remembrance that they were not a part of it, but instead were sitting on narrow hard seats in a wooden box in New York, a foreign country because it was not medieval France. Then the applause started.