She nodded, and I stopped at the exit. Ten was a hell of a scene, the one where Stanley and the drunken Blanche are alone in the flat, and I had to see her do it. I whispered a request to stay to the fiftyish man who’d brought us in, and he nodded an okay, as if speaking would break whatever spell was on the room. I remained there beside him.
“Our Stanley Kowalski was to be here today to read with the Blanches and Stellas, but a TV commitment prevented him,” Weidner said somewhat bitchily. “So if one of you gentlemen would be willing to read with Miss Remarque…”
There were no idiots among the men. Not one volunteered. “Ah, Mr. Taylor,” I heard Weidner say. My stomach tightened. I didn’t know whether he’d chosen Taylor to read with her out of sheer malevolence, or whether he was ignorant of their relationship, and it was coincidence—merely his spotting Taylor’s familiar face. Either way, I thought, the results could be unpleasant. And from the way several of the gypsies’ shoulders stiffened, I could tell they were thinking the same thing. “Would you please?”
Taylor got up slowly, and joined the girl on the platform. As far as I could see, there was no irritation in his face, nor was there any sign of dismay in Sheila Remarque’s deep, wet eyes. She smiled at him as though he were a stranger, and took a seat facing the “audience.”
“Anytime,” said Weidner. He sounded anxious. Not impatient, just anxious.
Sheila Remarque became drunk. Just like that, in the space of a heartbeat. Her whole body fell into the posture of a long-developed alcoholism. Her eyes blurred, her mouth opened, a careless slash across the ruin of her face, lined and bagged with booze. She spoke the lines as if no one had ever said them before, so any onlooker would swear that it was Blanche DuBois’s liquor-dulled brain that was creating them, and in no way were they merely words that had existed on a printed page for forty years, words filtered through the voice of a performer.
She finished speaking into the unseen mirror, and Guy Taylor walked toward her as Stanley Kowalski. Blanche saw him, spoke to him. But though she spoke to Stanley Kowalski, it was Guy Taylor who answered, only Guy Taylor reading lines, without a trace of emotion. Oh, the expression was there, the nuances, the rhythm of the lines, and their meaning was clear. But it was like watching La Duse play a scene with an electronic synthesizer. She destroyed him, and I thought back, hoping she hadn’t done the same to me.
This time Weidner didn’t let the scene play out to the end. I had to give him credit. As awful as Taylor was, I couldn’t have brought myself to deny the reality of Sheila Remarque’s performance by interrupting, but Weidner did, during one of Stanley’s longer speeches about his cousin who opened beer bottles with his teeth. “Okay, fine,” Weidner called out. “Good enough. Thank you, Mr. Taylor. I think that’s all we need see of you today.” Weidner looked away from him. “Miss Remarque, if you wouldn’t mind, I’d like to hear that one more time. Let’s see…Mr. Carver, would you read Stanley, please.” Carver, a chorus gypsy who had no business doing heavy work, staggered to the platform, his face pale, but I didn’t wait to see if he’d survive. I’d seen enough wings pulled off flies for one day, and was out the door, heading to the elevator even before Taylor had come off the platform.
I had just pushed the button when I saw Taylor, his dance bag over his shoulder, come out of the ballroom. He walked slowly down the hall toward me, and I prayed the car would arrive quickly enough that I wouldn’t have to ride with him. But the Ansonia’s lifts have seen better days, and by the time I stepped into the car he was a scant ten yards away. I held the door for him. He stepped in, the doors closed, and we were alone.
Taylor looked at me for a moment. “You’ll get Mitch,” he said flatly.
I shrugged self-consciously and smiled. “There’s a lot of people to read.”
“But they won’t read Mitch with her. And your reading was good.”
I nodded in agreement. “She helped.”
“May I,” he said after a pause, “give you some advice?” I nodded. “If they give you Mitch,” he said, “turn them down.”
“Why?” I asked, laughing.
“She’s sure to be Blanche. Don’t you think?”
“So?”
“You heard me read today.”
“So?”
“Have you seen me work?”
“I saw you in Annie. And in Bus Stop at ELT.”
“And?”
“You were good. Real good.”
“And what about today?”
I looked at the floor.
“Tell me.” I looked at him, my lips pinched. “Shitty,” he said. “Nothing there, right?”
“Not much,” I said.
“She did that. Took it from me.” He shook his head. “Stay away from her.
She can do it to you too.”
The first thing you learn in professional theater is that actors are children. I say that, knowing full well that I’m one myself. Our egos are huge, yet our feelings are as delicate as orchids. In a way, it stems from the fact that in other trades, rejections are impersonal. Writers aren’t rejected—it’s one particular story or novel that is. For factory workers, or white-collars, it’s lack of knowledge or experience that loses jobs. But for an actor, it’s the way he looks, the way he talks, the way he moves that make the heads nod yes or no, and that’s rejection on the most deeply personal scale, like kids calling each other nickel-nose or fatso. And often that childish hurt extends to other relationships as well. Superstitious? Imaginative? Ballplayers have nothing on us. So when Taylor started blaming Sheila Remarque for his thespian rockslide, I knew it was only because he couldn’t bear to admit that it was he who had let his craft slip away, not the girl who had taken it from him.
The elevator doors opened, and I stepped off. “Wait,” he said, coming after me. “You don’t believe me.”
“Look, man,” I said, turning in exasperation, “I don’t know what went on between you and her and I don’t care, okay? If she messed you over, I’m sorry, but I’m an actor and I need a job and if I get it I’ll take it!”
His face remained placid. “Let me buy you a drink,” he said.
“Oh Jesus…”
“You don’t have to be afraid. I won’t get violent.” He forced a smile. “Do you think I’ve been violent? Have I even raised my voice?”
“No.”
“Then please. I just want to talk to you.”
I had to admit to myself that I was curious. Most actors would have shown more fire over things that meant so much to them, but Taylor was strangely zombielike, as if life were just a walk-through. “All right,” I said, “all right.”
We walked silently down Broadway. By the time we got to Charlie’s it was three thirty, a slow time for the bar. I perched on a stool, but Taylor shook his head. “Table,” he said, and we took one and ordered. It turned out we were both bourbon drinkers.
“Jesus,” he said after a long sip. “It’s cold.”
It was. Manhattan winters are never balmy, and the winds that belly through the streets cut through anything short of steel.
“All right,” I said. “We’re here. You’re buying me a drink. Now. You have a story for me?”
“I do. And after I tell it you can go out and do what you like.”
“I intend to.”
“I won’t try to stop you,” he went on, not hearing me. “I don’t think I could even if I wanted to. It’s your life, your career.”
“Get to the point.”
“I met her last summer. June. I know Joe Papp, and he invited me to the party after the Lear opening, so I went. Sheila was there with a guy, and I walked up and introduced myself to them, and told her how much I enjoyed her performance. She thanked me, very gracious, very friendly, and told me she’d seen me several times and liked my work as well. I thought it odd at the time, the way she came on to me. Very strong, with those big, wet, bedroom eyes of hers eating me up. But her date didn’t seem to care. He didn’t seem to care about much of anything. Jus
t stood there and drank while she talked, then sat down and drank some more. She told me later, when we were together, that he was a poet. Unpublished, of course, she said. She told me that his work wasn’t very good technically, but that it was very emotional. ‘Rich with feeling,’ were the words she used.
“I went to see her in Lear again, several times really, and was more impressed with each performance. The poet was waiting for her the second time I went, but the third, she left alone. I finessed her into a drink, we talked, got along beautifully. She told me it was all over between her and the poet, and that night she ended up in my bed. It was good, and she seemed friendly, passionate, yet undemanding. After a few more dates, a few more nights and mornings, I suggested living together, no commitments. She agreed, and the next weekend she moved in with me.
“I want you to understand one thing, though. I never loved her. I never told her I loved her or even suggested it. For me, it was companionship and sex, and that was all. Though she was good to be with, nice to kiss, to hold, to share things with, I never loved her. And I know she never loved me.” He signaled the waiter and another drink came. Mine was still half full. “So I’m not a…a victim of unrequited love, all right? I just want you to be sure of that.” I nodded and he went on.
“It started a few weeks after we were living together. She’d want to play games with me, she said. Theater games. You know, pretend she was doing something or say something to get a certain emotion out of me. Most of the time she didn’t let me know right away what she was doing. She’d see if she could get me jealous, or mad, or sullen. Happy too. And then she’d laugh and say she was just kidding, that she’d just wanted to see my reactions. Well, I thought that was bullshit. I put it down as a technique exercise rather than any method crap, and in a way I could understand it—wanting to be face to face with emotions to examine them—but I still thought it was an imposition on me, an invasion of my privacy. She didn’t do it often, maybe once or twice a week. I tried it on her occasionally, but she never bit, just looked at me as if I were a kid trying to play a man’s game.
“Somewhere along the line it started getting kinky. While we were having sex, she’d call me by another name, or tell me about something sad she’d remembered, anything to get different reactions, different rises out of me. Sometimes…” He looked down, drained his drink. “Sometimes I’d…come and I’d cry at the same time.”
The waiter was nearby, and I signaled for another round. “Why did you stay with her?”
“It wasn’t…she didn’t do this all the time, like I said. And I liked her. It got so I didn’t even mind it when she’d pull this stuff on me, and she knew it. Once she even got me when I was stoned, and a couple of times after I’d had too much to drink. I didn’t care. Until winter came.
“I hadn’t been doing much after the summer. A few industrials here in town, some voice-over stuff. Good money, but just straight song and dance, flat narration, and no reviews. So the beginning of December Harv Piersall calls me to try out for Ahab. The musical that closed in previews? He wanted me to read for Starbuck, a scene where Starbuck is planning to shoot Ahab to save the Pequod. It was a good scene, a strong scene, and I got up there and I couldn’t do a thing with it. Not a goddamned thing. I was utterly flat, just like in my narration and my singing around a Pontiac. But there it hadn’t mattered—I hadn’t had to put out any emotion—just sell the product, that was all. But now, when I had to feel something, had to express something, I couldn’t. Harv asked me if anything was wrong, and I babbled some excuse about not feeling well, and when he invited me to come back and read again I did, a day later, and it was the same.
“That weekend I went down to St. Mark’s to see Sheila in an OOB production—it was a new translation of Medea by some grad student at NYU—and she’d gotten the title role. They’d been rehearsing off and on for a month, no pay to speak of, but she was enthusiastic about it. It was the largest and most important part she’d done. Papp was there that night, someone got Prince to come too. The translation was garbage. No set, tunics for costumes, nothing lighting. But Sheila…”
He finished his latest drink, spat the ice back into the glass. “She was…superb. Every emotion was real. They should have been. She’d taken them from me.
“Don’t look at me like that. I thought what you’re thinking too, at first. That I was paranoid, jealous of her talents. But once I started to think things through, I knew it was the only answer.
“She was so loving to me afterward, smiled at me and held my arm and introduced me to her friends, and I felt as dull and lifeless as that poet I’d seen her with. Even then I suspected what she’d done, but I didn’t say anything to her about it. That next week when I tried to get in touch with the poet, I found out he’d left the city, gone home to wherever it was he’d come from. I went over to Lincoln Center, to their videotape collection, and watched King Lear. I wanted to see if I could find anything that didn’t jell, that wasn’t quite right. Hell, I didn’t know what I was looking for, just that I’d know when I saw it.”
He shook his head. “It was…incredible. On the tape there was no sign of the performance I’d seen her give. Instead I saw a flat, lifeless, amateurish performance, dreadfully bad in contrast to the others. I couldn’t believe it, watched it again. The same thing. Then I knew why she never auditioned for commercials, or for film. It didn’t…show up on camera. She could fool people, but not a camera.
“I went back to the apartment then, and told her what I’d found out. It wasn’t guessing on my part, not a theory, because I knew by then. You see, I knew.”
Taylor stopped talking and looked down into his empty glass. I thought perhaps I’d made a huge mistake in going to the bar with him, for he was most certainly paranoid, and could conceivably become violent as well, in spite of his assurances to the contrary. “So what…” My so came out too much like sho, but I pushed on with my question while he flagged the waiter, who raised an eyebrow, but brought more drinks. “So what did she say? When you told her?”
“She…verified it. Told me that I was right. ‘In a way,’ she said. In a way.”
“Well…” I shook my head to clear it. “…didn’t she probably mean that she was just studying you? That’s hardly, hardly stealing your emotions, is it?”
“No. She stole them.”
“That’s silly. That’s still silly. You’ve still got them.”
“No. I wanted…when I knew for sure, I wanted to kill her. The way she smiled at me, as though I were powerless to take anything back, as though she had planned it all from the moment we met—that made me want to kill her.” He turned his empty eyes on me. “But I didn’t. Couldn’t. I couldn’t get angry enough.”
He sighed. “She moved out. That didn’t bother me. I was glad. As glad as I could feel after what she’d done. I don’t know how she did it. I think it was something she learned, or learned she had. I don’t know whether I’ll ever get them back or not, either. Oh, not from her. Never from her. But on my own. Build them up inside me somehow. The emotions. The feelings. Maybe someday.”
He reached across the table and touched my hand, his fingers surprisingly warm. “So much I don’t know. But one thing I do. She’ll do it again, find someone else, you if you let her. I saw how you were looking at her today.” I pulled my hand away from his, bumping my drink. He grabbed it before it spilled, set it upright. “Don’t,” he cautioned. “Don’t have anything to do with her.”
“It’s absurd,” I said, half stuttering. “Ridiculous. You still…show emotions.”
“Maybe. Maybe a few. But they’re only outward signs. Inside it’s hollow.” His head went to one side. “You don’t believe me.”
“N-no…” And I didn’t, not then.
“You should have known me before.”
Suddenly I remembered Kevin at the audition, and his telling me how funny and wild Guy Taylor had gotten on a few drinks. My own churning stomach reminded me of how many we had had sitting here for les
s than an hour, and my churning mind showed me Sheila Remarque’s drunk, drunk, perfectly drunk Blanche DuBois earlier that afternoon. “You’ve had…” I babbled, “…how many drinks have you had?”
He shrugged.
“But…you’re not…showing any signs…”
“Yes. That’s right,” he said in a clear, steady, sober voice. “That’s right.”
He crossed his forearms on the table, lowered his head onto them, and wept. The sobs were loud, prolonged, shaking his whole body.
He wept.
“There!” I cried, staggering to my feet. “There, see? See? You’re crying, you’re crying! See?”
He raised his head and looked at me, still weeping, still weeping, with not one tear to be seen.
When the call came offering me Mitch, I took the part. I didn’t even consider turning it down. Sheila Remarque had, as Kevin, Guy Taylor, and I had anticipated, been cast as Blanche DuBois, and she smiled warmly at me when I entered the studio for the first reading, as though she remembered our audition with fondness. I was pleasant, but somewhat aloof at first, not wanting the others to see, to suspect what I was going to do.
I thought it might be difficult to get her alone, but it wasn’t. She had already chosen me, I could tell, watching me through the readings, coming up to me and chatting at the breaks. By the end of the day she’d learned where I lived, that I was single, unattached, and straight, and that I’d been bucking for eight years to get a part this good. She told me that she lived only a block away from my building (a lie, I later found out), and, after the rehearsal, suggested we take a cab together and split the expense. I agreed, and the cab left us out on West 72nd next to the park.
It was dark and cold, and I saw her shiver under her down-filled jacket. I shivered too, for we were alone at last, somewhat hidden by the trees, and there were no passersby to be seen, only the taxis and buses and cars hurtling past.
I turned to her, the smile gone from my face. “I know what you’ve done,” I said. “I talked to Guy Taylor. He told me all about it. And warned me.”
The Night Listener and Others Page 5
