The Stone Loves the World

by BRIAN HALL

  As usual, Saskia didn’t know precisely what load she was supposed to get, but nurtured a small hope that her daughter might help her out. She opted for generic encouragement. Wow. They’re beautiful.

  Mette answered immediately, meaning this really was the object on her radar at the moment. you think so?

  Saskia hated it when she did that. Did she mean it to be a test, or was she just being oblivious? Backtracking, hedging your bet, wimping out with a don’t you? was never wise, Mette hated opinions that weren’t sincere. Well it was perfectly plausible to see them as beautiful, so fuck her. Yes I do.

  Mette didn’t answer.

  Was that a conversation?

  “I want to hear more about what you’re doing,” she says to Quentin.

  “Futzing with windows on an ugly apartment building.”

  “But I’m actually interested. What’s the futzing you’re doing?”

  So they spend the rest of the meal on that, on bathroom placement, on which way doors open and why, concrete strength, cautious engineers, crazy clients, squabbling partners, with detours into Marly’s fatigue, her own boss troubles, her encouragement that Quentin start his own business before his soul gets crushed, their fixer-upper off Cortelyou in Brooklyn that is turning out to need work costing the equivalent of two brand-new houses of equal size, plus several long sudsy baths in everything Annabelle.

  Quentin vacuums. Saskia’s heart warms. She’s Ma on the prairie, rough reddened hands on hips, watching her strapping son tuck into his second helping of apple pie. “Don’t forget to drink all your buttermilk,” she says.

  He doesn’t miss a beat. “Shore thang, Maw.”

  Quentin grabs the check.

  “No, you did that last time.”

  “I’m an architect, you’re an actor.”

  “I’m doing fine.”

  “Next time.”

  “Quentin, I’m serious. It doesn’t make me feel good.” She doesn’t add, You’re being Male.

  He gazes at her for a second, then hands her the check. “OK.”

  When they hug goodbye out on the sidewalk, he says, “I’m just trying to repay you for taking care of me for so many years.”

  “Oh, Quentin.” She squeezes him. “You’re the only reason I survived adolescence.”

  He lets go, smiles questioningly.

  “I have to go,” she says. “Mette . . .”

  “Of course.”

  She heads up the avenue, toward the L.

  She regrets that last exchange. Mette is almost twenty-one, but the mere mention of her name is accepted as a reason that Saskia must get home. She didn’t mean it that way, she was thinking only that she hadn’t heard from her, wanted to check in, leave time to go out for the groceries in case Mette had forgotten. Did other people, even Quentin, think that her daughter needed, what?—supervision?

  A score of human bundles are scattered along the subway platform. Freezing, drafty, damp. Saskia hugs herself.

  The family . . . Seeing Quentin always brings it back. Her “childhood.” From the age of ten, wasn’t she the only adult in the house? Well, no, that isn’t fair. She was no more adult than her mother. The two of them tried to raise the Lost Kids like a pair of Lost Girls who kept pointing at each other: You be Wendy! No, you be Wendy!

  Saskia detests movies that culminate in the idea that, hey, we’re untraditional, but we’re a family. (She was even in one once, as a harried receptionist at a Planned Parenthood clinic. The totality of her lines, post–cutting room: “Next!”) They hide the hard issue behind the easy one. The question isn’t whether Dad is married to another Dad, or if Sis has accomplished a virgin birth, or if the contra-colored urchin from down alleyway is always at the dinner table. The pesky question in most families is, Does anyone really care about anyone else?

  Whenever Saskia starts a new relationship, she dreads this topic. The supposedly innocent icebreaker, “So what about your family?” Every answer she gives leads to another question. “Wait—what?” The men pursue it because it’s a puzzle; the women, because they mainline this stuff.

  When she was four, her Danish father tried to commit hara-kiri and subsequently disappeared in an ambulance. Being dead would have been an adequate excuse for never coming back, but he healed up just fine and went on to wander the world, pursuing a series of interests that absorbed him way more than Saskia ever did. Meanwhile, her mother, Lauren, climbed into Space Shuttle Denial and lifted off into orbit (don’t worry, Earth lovers, it ran on vegetable oil). There were five kids on the property, a former whacked-out commune drowning in wild grape along Cayuga Lake north of Ithaca, New York. (Mr. Gets-a-D-in-Suicide had been the guru.) Saskia, Lauren, and the other children lived in the old house. Lauren’s series of pot-smoking boyfriends lived successively in one of the two trailers until ineffectual Bill moved in and stayed. In the other trailer was thin, raspy Jo, devotée of that older sacred American drug, tobacco, and abandoned mother of the four kids who weren’t Saskia. This is where Hallmark can clap the clapstick: all eight human bundles gathered nightly ’round the groaning board. Jo’s four children were cuddly Melanie (one year younger than Saskia), the proto-delinquent twins Austin and Shannon (three years younger), and the underwatered houseplant known as Quinnie (five years younger). Of the many family secrets Lauren never got around to telling Saskia, one of them was that Quinnie’s facial resemblance to Saskia’s wasn’t a Lamarckian consequence of her years of singlehandedly nurturing him, but because Dad had fucked Jo shortly before decamping.

  Saskia’s pillow talk with new partners was terse on this dialogue thread, no matter what options the player chose. She wasn’t trying to be enigmatic, she was just sick of the subject. Also, aware of her propensity for fanciful elaboration—not to mention occasional substitution of entirely different narratives of ad hoc inspiration—she did not want to start a new relationship dishonestly.

  Back to the Afternoon TV Special: yes, they passed the string beans to each other, and even laughed on occasion—where’s the freeze frame when you need it?—but who would be in the sequel? She had grown to like boyfriend Bill, his hopeless writer’s dreams, his decent loyalty to Lauren, but when Lauren died he wandered off and stopped answering Saskia’s emails after a year. It’s possible he was heartbroken, but weren’t he and Saskia “family” by then? How many fucking string beans does it take? Jo died of throat cancer five years ago, so she gets a pass. Melanie, a stay-at-home mom in San Jose, sends Saskia Christmas greetings, but that’s it. When they were children, Saskia adored the younger girl, but when Melanie was eighteen, the thirty-four-year-old minister of a local evangelical church led her to Jesus, his bed, and the altar in an order Saskia would be very curious to know, and since then Saskia’s bisexuality has been a bit of a sore subject. Austin and Shannon grew up most like Jo, a couple of wisecracking, school-skipping, drug-loving troublemakers. They’re both somewhere in northern Maine, and don’t return calls.

  And then there’s Thomas. (That would be “Dad.”) He will live forever. Failing to kill himself with a ceremonial Japanese tantō was the fairy-tale proof of his immortality. The last Saskia heard, he’s been incarnating a holy hermit perched atop a windmill on some remote Danish island. She kids not. Anyway, the point is, when this flamboyant three-masted schooner with its tangled rigging went gurgling to the bottom, the only thing that bobbed to the surface in Saskia’s vicinity was Quentin. I’ll be flotsam, you be jetsam.

  Speaking of which, she’s emerging from the depths at the north end of the Greenpoint Avenue Station, into arctic winds. Jumping Jehosaphat! She shrivels, turns her shoulder upwind, hobbles homeward. She got a tiny bit inured to the cold during the past two winters when all that polar-vortex shit was going on, but this winter has been mostly milder. I may be some time, she says to her tentmate and fellow explorer, heading out to her plucky British death. God save the Queen, and damn the torpedoes! H
er apartment is only a block away, but the wind is against her. She turns around and leans backward into it, pushing with her feet against the peanut-brittle ice on the sidewalk. She fumbles with her keys through her mittens at the door, shoulders in, mashes it shut behind her. On through the inner door, past the door to the ground floor apartment, which belongs to the family she rents the second floor from. Sounds of television. True to Greenpoint’s Wikipedia paragraph on demographics, they’re Polish American, an old woman and her middle-aged bachelor son. His divorced sister and her two young children lived upstairs until they all died from carbon monoxide poisoning in a snug little cabin in the Poconos eight years ago. The old woman, Aniela, used to be talkative in her grief, and Saskia sat with her on a number of afternoons in the early months of her rental. Aniela lived in Krakow until she was twenty-six, and Saskia’s generic Polish accent is a shameless full-bore imitation of her.

  She unlocks the door at the top of the stairs. “Mette?”

  She walks through the sitting room, glances in the kitchen. Knocks on her daughter’s bedroom door. “Mette?” Cracks the door. (Mette would prefer to lock it, but the fire escape is through her window, and Saskia vowed to never under any circumstance step across the threshold when Mette wasn’t there, unless a roaring inferno convincingly blocked the stairway.) “Mette?” Swings the door open.

  Damn that girl. (Woman.) Nothing for breakfast tomorrow, and Saskia’s not going back out into that cold. Why can’t she answer her texts?

  Saskia makes tea, grabs the remote, settles on the couch under a chenille bedspread she rescued from the attic of the old house upstate. Something from her mother’s childhood (which Saskia knows nothing about, beyond rumors of family wealth, six older brothers, and Grand Guignol). It’s coming up on nine-thirty. She’ll wait up. She sips the tea and listens to the wind against the window.

  There was a line today, toward the end of the session. If the player decides to bring the Hispanic cutie along in the escape pod, apparently the oxygen runs out and they have to make an emergency crash landing on an uncharted planet (these people have faster-than-light travel, but pre-Columbian mapping technology). Phil explained there’d be a cutscene, so Saskia imagined a descent through atmosphere, red haze of heat-shield burn, clouds parting, jungly riverine valley, looming treetops, kaboom! Compressed-air sound effect as hatch opens. Player stumbles out. Cue the cutie, bloodied and dazed (tits, thank God, intact): “Wh—where are we? What is this place?”

  She did the usual three takes on the line, then asked Phil if she could do them over.

  “Um, sure,” he said, sounding surprised. “Those were good.”

  “I can do it better.”

  “Go for it.”

  In the previous takes she’d been distracted trying to fight the shivers running up and down her body, but now she cracked open the door to the memory, which lent to her voice an authentic thrill of awe. She asked to hear the playback. She was delighted. No, it isn’t all tricks. (In other words, tricked herself again!)

  Years ago, she acted in a Shakespeare company in Ithaca. It’s how she caught the bug. She’d dropped out of college and popped out Mette, was living with Lauren on the old commune. Brainless besotted baby worship was just giving way to the willies: she would end up like her mother, waiting tables in Ithaca and selling produce at the Farmer’s Market, wrapping her lonely self in a New Age crazy quilt. She’d disliked college, so going back wasn’t the solution. It never occurred to her that acting might be, she just had to do something to get her sorry ass off the property. She saw a notice about auditions, went into town and read, and they gave her Ursula in Much Ado.

  She didn’t get paid, of course. This was a bunch of amateurs, for whom friends donated five dollars at the door. They used the money to rent a space in a small defunct movie theater. Costumes were pieced together from the Salvation Army store. Sets were minimal, and therefore pretty good: ships were ropes hanging in swags, thrones were tall chairs, woods were shadows of paper leaves hung in a mesh over the stage lights. Looking back, Saskia has no idea whether she could act, but she could tell right away that some of her fellow actors couldn’t. The younger ones weren’t bad, because most of them hailed from the Ithaca College theater department. Additionally, there were two former Equity actors who had fetched up on the town’s shores (“Wh—where are we? What is this place?”) and decided to stay. But there was a coterie of old codgers with only three ways of delivering any line given to them: angry (incomprehensible shouting), neutral (rotely cadenced, deaf to meaning), and distressed (like angry, only scrunch-faced). There was also the occasional smug young jerk with one or two tricks up his sleeve (95 percent were “he”), such as a naturally rich voice or the ability to produce tears on cue, that sufficed so well for his self-esteem that he could otherwise sleepwalk through his part.

  Observing all this, Saskia discovered a mission—she could dedicate herself to not sucking as an actor.

  They gave her scraps: Third Servant in Henry IV, Second Murderer in Macbeth, Mariana in Measure for Measure. Progress toward bigger parts was slow, because Dorothy, one of the founding members of the company, took the best roles for herself, and there were always one or two fresh Ithaca College faces to snap up the secondary female roles. Finally, though, at the end of Saskia’s second year, they gave her Thaisa in Pericles, partly because the June performances came too late in the spring for the students and partly because, even though Dorothy wanted to play both Thaisa and her daughter Marina, she was vetoed by her husband (the director) who didn’t want to use a double in the final reunion scene, in which the two characters appear together. There was a lovely childish fight about this, in front of everyone. Actors are fun that way.

  Could Saskia act? Impossible to know. But something happened to her in that play. At its midpoint, Thaisa gives birth to Marina on a ship at sea during a storm and, seeming to have died, is tossed overboard in a sealed casket. This washes up in Ephesus, near the home of a doctor named Cerimon, whose servants discover it, carry it into his house, pop the lid, and marvel at the beautiful corpse. Recognizing all the signs of a Shakespearean resurrection scene, Cerimon calls for his medicines, bids the viol play, and lo! Thaisa wakens and speaks. If you’re playing Thaisa and you’re a bad actor, it’s an easy scene, because you’ve only got thirteen words. If you have hopes of someday being a good actor, it’s terrifying—you’ve got only thirteen words in which to blaze forth a miracle, make the audience gasp, swoon, and then wake, as you, reborn.

  Rehearsals of the scene had focused on practical issues. Since she had to be in the casket when they carried it in, much time was devoted to figuring out how to bang her around less. Also, if the platform they put her on was too low, Cerimon had to crouch, which didn’t look solemn, but if it was too high, it called to mind an operating table, thus Frankenstein. Should they position the casket so that the audience could see her while she was still lying in it? Should Cerimon touch her in some way, as part of the wakening process? As a result, the only time they played the scene straight through was at the dress rehearsal.

  On opening night, twenty-five indulgent souls showed up and the imaginary curtain rose. Thaisa’s first scene is undramatic and kind of dumb—a pageant of knights crosses the stage, each bearing a shield that Thaisa describes at length to her father, King Simonides. The king was being played by one of the talentless duffers, whom Saskia wanted to poleax. The audience was a lump of clay and all her lines seemed inert and abject. Then she had her brief bit with Pericles in which he wins a tournament and dances with her and steals her heart. Then there’s the sea-storm, Thaisa dies without a word, and lies on stage like an obedient dead woman while Pericles eloquently mourns her. After that, it’s into the old box with her and over the side, heave-ho. (Which would make her jetsam, rather than flotsam.)

  So—although this was Saskia’s largest role to date, she was beginning to realize, as it flew by in performance, that there wasn�
��t much to it. Well, of course, that’s why they gave it to her. Virtually all she had left for the night were those thirteen words. She was in tears in the half-gutted, junk-filled side room they called “backstage.” But she had only ninety seconds between getting carted off on a bier and carted back in in a box, so she blew her nose and thumbed her eyes, while First Servant patted her shoulder and said, “Hey, hey,” but wasn’t experienced enough to add, “You’re doing great!” She threw on the Salvation Army moth-eaten magnificent “cloth of state” and lay down. First and Second Servant put in the bags of dried leaves that were the spices, the gilded plastic crap that was the treasure, then dropped the lid onto the Velcro strips and lifted her. She was swayed and bumped up the stairs.

  “So; lift there!” she heard through the plywood. (That would be First Servant.)

  “What’s that?” (Cerimon.)

  “Sir, even now did the sea toss up upon our shore this chest. ’Tis of some wrack.”

  “Set’t down, let’s look upon’t.”

  With a final pitch and a yaw she came to rest. She closed her eyes.

  “How close ’tis caulked and bitumed! Did the sea cast it up?”

  “I never saw so huge a billow, sir, as tossed it upon shore.”

  “Wrench it open: soft! It smells most sweetly in my sense.”

  “A delicate odor.”

  “As ever hit my nostril. So; up with it!” The lid was removed. “O you most potent gods! What’s here, a corpse!”

  The audience couldn’t see her (Blocking Decision #2), but she kept her eyes closed so as not to distract the players. (If she’d been an old hand during a long run, especially if British—those blokes play rough—she’d have crossed her eyes and stuck out her tongue just as Cerimon bent over her.) Maybe her disappointment in her performance so far made it easier for her to believe that she was someplace far away from upstate New York, so why not on Ephesus’s shore? She had been an actor on a troupe ship, and they’d hanged her for incompetence. But the currents had been merciful, directing her shoreward, and a handsome young serving lad (long naked tanned torso, loincloth, hint of pubic hair peeking out, hello!) pulled her casket out of the surge. She was being given a second chance.