The Stone Loves the World

by BRIAN HALL

  But a gal has a brain. And too much timelessness starts to look like death. So once Mette was stumbling around upright and burbling in code, Saskia got a part-time job at a coffee roaster for the money and joined the Shakespeare Duffers for the grins. For the next three years she did the sort of thing wannabe actors do when they live near a little college town and can’t go anywhere because they have a young child and no money. She showed up at every piddling audition she saw posted and got used to making a fool of herself. She looked at it this way: an actor, ideally, is an empty vessel filled with inspiration, or in other words, a holy fool. So she was a fool in training. There was a line from Love’s Labour’s Lost that she ritually said to herself before entering an audition, to summon luck. Berowne is speaking to his king after they’ve put on a courtly masque and failed spectacularly. They’re about to present a second theatrical effort to the same women who mocked the first, and the king says, with endearing boyish pathos, “They will shame us.” To which Berowne responds, “We are shame-proof, my lord.”

  For its size, Ithaca had a lot of theater and filmmaking going on—student films at Ithaca College and Cornell, one semi-professional theater of decent repute, one mostly amateur company of no fixed abode, plus, in the summer, Shakespeare alfresco in the Cornell Plantations and a more commercial enterprise (Guys and Dolls, The Crucible, etc) housed in a repurposed airplane hangar built back when airplanes had more than two wings. In addition, there were several small production companies doing documentaries, commercials, HR training films, and the occasional short narrative fledged with its creators’ hopes of Robin Hooding some bull’s-eye at Sundance, Berlin, New York, you name it.

  She remembers her first audition, for a student film at Ithaca College, a pink basement room inhabited by two giggling nerds (director and writer), and a lifeless page of stoned dialogue about some betrayal. She couldn’t summon up a thing except embarrassment, which the nerds, to their credit, figured out in under a minute. Other early auditions have gummed together in her memory. There were stages with dazzling lights in her eyes, offices with comfy chairs and a glass of water, long readings and brutally short ones, asshole directors and kind directors and clueless, insecure directors. Meanwhile, she did more Shakespeare—ironic that the only work she could get at first was with the immortal Bard—although the long-entrenched regulars of the company (speaking of immortal) continued to take most of the best parts. Still, she landed Hermia in Midsummer Night’s Dream, probably because for once, here was an actress hilariously short enough for all the dwarf jokes to make sense.

  She learned how to be a bigger and better fool. She took a Meisner workshop, which helped her to stay true in the moment. In one of the showcases she performed a twelve-minute playlet with her favorite fellow attendee—bald, big-browed Paul; the scene was a bitter marital argument about a dead son—and she felt it lift off in front of the audience, she could see that Paul felt it, too, and they mentally joined hands and flew out the window. Like Wendy and Peter, they could keep flying so long as the audience kept thinking, You can fly. All her life, she had worried that she was too self-absorbed (have you ever noticed, by the way, that no man ever worries about this?) but this felt like a profligate sharing. It felt shame-proof.

  But you’re only a good actor until your good scene ends. Then it’s back to being a fool. She started to land a few parts. And she had to learn, as all actors must, how to keep searching for something true in the succession of false moments of a bad script. (Who knew that not every writer out there is as good as Shakespeare?) This was particularly true with regard to the student films. There was one about cutting, for example, in which—milestone!—she played the lead. That being said, her humble goal ever since has been never to recall a single second of it. In her last year in Ithaca she had small roles in five of the nine plays put on by the second-best non-university-affiliated theater in town, which she liked to refer to by the Marquez-y name MACONFA—Mostly Amateur Company Of No Fixed Abode—although its official name was The Other Shoe. They rented out different venues for different productions, depending on availability and cost. The artistic director, Jules, was a forty-five-year-old woman who’d done some theater in New York but disliked the city—she’d grown up in a Nebraska town whose only claim to fame was that in 1936 a tornado destroyed every standing structure in it—and had moved to Ithaca when her partner landed a job in the Cornell chemistry department. Eight months later she got dumped when said partner moved in with one of the professors on the hiring committee. Turned out the two women had been carrying on a torrid affair for years at conferences around the country. (A joke not to make to Jules: “Talk about chemistry!”)

  Jules figured that the way to compete with the more established theater in town was to be adventuresome and high-concept. The Other Shoe’s much lower production costs made it practicable to throw a ton of shit at the wall and see what stuck. So in the one season that Saskia worked regularly with the company, the first two plays were Aristophanes’ The Birds and Brook and Carrière’s The Conference of the Birds, both performed with masks in the lecture hall at Cornell’s Lab of Ornithology. The pitch was, Hey folks, how often do you get to see the hoopoe as a major character twice in one season? It actually worked pretty well, because the lab director got excited and did a fantastic job, for free, of putting together a soundtrack of the appropriate birdcalls. He also spread the word to Ithaca’s legion of birders, who showed up in force. Another of Jules’s strategies was to put on lesser-known plays by well-known playwrights. So for Stoppard, instead of Arcadia or Rosencrantz or The Invention of Love, they did Hapgood. (Yes, you’ve never heard of it.) And for Brecht, instead of Mother Courage or Caucasian Chalk Circle, they did St. Joan of the Stockyards. (Ugh.) The final show, in June, was made up of three one-acts, all involving The Power of Story (Saskia can’t take credit for that original idea, it was on the poster): Sam Shepard’s Icarus’s Mother, followed by the two one-acts that make up Caryl Churchill’s Blue Heart. Feminist Churchill blew macho Shepard out of the water, which maybe was Jules’s sneaky idea all along.

  Still, Icarus’s Mother has good bits, and Saskia got to play Pat. She and the play’s four other characters—Bill, Howard, Jill, and Frank—are in a park overlooking an ocean beach, waiting for fireworks to begin. Bill and Howard, who seem to be the boyfriends of Jill and Pat respectively, continually mock the women in a revolting conspiratorial bromantic way, and Howard occasionally manhandles Pat. Meanwhile, there’s a jet circling in the sky, making everyone nervous. Each character at some point gets a monologue that indulges a fantasy, or attempts to delude the other characters (the Power of Story!), and these monologues gradually spin off into flights of crazed weirdness, à la Saint Sam the Badass in the wilderness dining on locusts and wild honey. Self-loving Howard gets the longest one, while his cowed girlfriend Pat gets the shortest, but hers is the best. She imagines an evening in which all the fireworks have failed, the crowd has gone home disappointed, the fireworks company departed in shame, while she alone remains behind in the darkness. Examining the launchers, she discovers there’s one firework left and lights it. It rockets skyward and explodes in glorious light and color, and she is the only one who gets to see it.

  They performed the play five times and then the season was over. Saskia was surprised at how bereft she felt. It was her first experience of the bond one can form with fellow actors when you work together as a company, reveling in the good plays and struggling against the bad, sometimes loving each other, sometimes hating. Like a family, yes! Ohmygod, trust falls on stage, yes! To Saskia, the coming summer looked desolate. But it turned out that four of the five actors in Icarus’s Mother were going to be in town for the July 4 holiday, so Saskia, the dewy-eyed newbie, proposed that they mount a repeat performance somewhere outside, timing it so that the play’s fireworks would coincide with Ithaca’s real fireworks (which actually were always on July 2, when the city could get a discounted rate). The fifth actor was Jaso
n, who played Howard, and though he was, one had to admit sub rosa, even if one loved him like family, a bit of a dick, he agreed to come up from New York City just for the one performance, for which hugs and kisses and trust falls forever. Allie, who played Jill, suggested they do it at Sunset Park, a quarter acre of lawn owned by the village of Cayuga Heights with a view over Ithaca and the lake. Judging from a certain previous experience she never fully explained, Allie doubted they could get a permit from the village police, and they didn’t want to put up with the hassle anyway (they would probably be told they needed two porta-johns, a security guard, and a medic with a defibrillator), so Allie and Sean (who played Frank) spread the word rave-style, the details of which Saskia was already too old to understand. Something involving cell phones.

  Whatever it was they did, about forty people had shown up by 8:45 p.m. on the day, just as the sun was setting. The city fireworks reliably started within a few minutes of 9:45, and the play took forty minutes to perform, so they crossed their fingers and began at 9:10. It was as beautiful an evening as they could have hoped for, clear and unseasonably cool, with three stage-managed clouds above the western ridge turning, as they spoke the first lines, from rose to maroon. The location was perfect. Saskia wondered if the other actors, like her, only gradually realized how perfect it was. All the lines in the play that referred to the setting fit the actual setting. People frequently picnicked in Sunset Park, so their props—blanket and empty plates, tipped-over wine glasses, disarranged hamper—without changing a molecule, became real. The actors found themselves spontaneously adjusting the blocking. When Frank enthused about the beach and urged everyone to go down there, Sean moved to the lip of the slope, and gestured toward the lake. When Bill referred to the moon, Hayden pointed upward and lo, there she was in the southeast, a good trouper come up specially from New York City along with Jason to help out. For Pat’s monologue, Saskia lay down on the blanket, looked at the sky, and wished her bullying boyfriend would leave her alone. The only way she knew to protect herself was to retreat into childishness, to make her powerlessness more pitiable. “If none of them work except one, it will be worth it,” she said. “I’ll wait all night on my back.” Did the others realize that she was also talking about sex with Howard, which repulsed her? That her only release was in lonely masturbation? “Even if I’m the only one left in the whole park and even if all the men who launch the firecrackers go home in despair and anguish and humiliation. I’ll go down there myself and hook up the thing by myself and fire the thing without any help and run back up here and lie on my back and wait and listen and watch the goddamn thing explode all over the sky.”

  The play went on in its perfect way. Allie’s friend Danielle stood in the putative wings with watch and script, raising her hand high when they needed to pick up the pace, lowering it when they needed to slow. Frank had gone for a walk along the beach and had seen something, either the crash of the jet into the water or an atomic bomb going off, or maybe they were the same thing, and he described it in a mounting frenzy, heading for the line “What a light!” at which point, in the stage directions, the first firework is supposed to go off, as if called into being by Frank’s exclamation. (Let there be—, Genesis and Apocalypse rolled into one; like sex with Howard, it’s over almost before it begins.) This was the tricky part. Thanks to Danielle, it was 9:45, but of course they couldn’t know precisely when the first firework would be lit. Sean gestured and gibbered magnificently—His flashing eyes! His floating hair!—and came up to the line invoking the Light, then on a hunch veered off and improvised for a minute, a stoned word-salad that fit the script pretty well (go Sean!), then circled back around and hit his mark, “What a light!”

  Well, nothing in this fallen world, after all, is perfect. Fortunately, Frank’s words never directly refer to the detonations, so there’s a bit of leeway, and eighty-two seconds later (by Danielle’s stopwatch), just as Sean was saying, “—and to hear a sound so shrieking that it ain’t even a sound at all but goes beyond that into the inside of the center of each ear,” there was a whistle and a pencil-line of orange light ascending from the lakeshore below, followed by a crack and a bloom. Which in this fallen world is pretty fucking good. The rest of Frank’s monologue is more and more frenzied, and through it all the City of Ithaca and the fireworks company did a fantastic job with the sound and light effects, Thanks guys, you’re the best! The End!

  There was a celebration afterward at a pizza bar, and they all agreed that the performance had been fucking awesome, indescribable, so-and-so should have been there, what a . . . ! wasn’t it a . . . ? They drank and gorged and loved each other, and Saskia drove back to the old farm in a state of bliss like nothing she had ever experienced. She would do nearly anything to experience it again.

  The next day, Quentin drove over from an internship in Boston to celebrate Saskia’s birthday on the 4th. That evening, the 3rd, Lauren told both of them, with an air so serene it was like a blank wall, that she was dying of cancer.

  * * *

  • • •

  Saskia hates to think about this period. She’s never been able to put her feelings about it in any order. She was fucking furious. (OK, she supposes if she had to order it, that would be the first.) Lauren had known for eighteen months. She was first diagnosed at stage II, which if treated, has a 93 percent survival rate after five years and a 75 percent survival rate after ten. You can bet your ass Saskia looked up the data on this. Lauren told Bill after six months, but swore him to secrecy, and this hapless feckless boob who couldn’t keep from blurting out the ends of movies he’d already seen, or providing his bank account and social security number to robocalls with Russian accents, somehow managed to spend a year watching Lauren fail to beat it, and not say one single goddamn word to Saskia, with whom he sat down to break bread every day.

  And how was Lauren trying to beat it? With herbal infusions, sesame oil massages, yoga, crystals, a gluten-free diet, low-temperature cooking, meditation, levitation, spontaneous combustion, vomiting pea soup, rotating her head completely around, etc. Saskia hadn’t noticed anything because Lauren was always following some sort of regime that mixed and matched this crap. A woman has a right to make decisions about her own body, of course. So thank you, Mom! Saskia was fucking furious and felt guilty about it. (Can she be horrifically selfish just for a second? It made sense for Lauren to wait for an opportunity when Quentin was also around, since he and Saskia were the closest to her, but did she really have to break the news on the eve of Saskia’s birthday? Really, after eighteen months, right then, thus ruining Saskia’s birthday for the rest of her life?)

  Lumpectomy, radiation, a little chemo, hormone therapy: that was the treatment recommended by the oncologist back when Lauren had every chance to save her life. But those were “Western.” And everything Western is evil, like nuclear weapons and double-blind medical trials. All her peacefulness and gentleness, without changing a molecule, turned back into passiveness and vagueness, a fastidious aversion to grappling with the real world, a refusal to be “impure”—yes! That was her word! Pure food, pure energy, pure thoughts. As if Saskia’s father hadn’t abundantly shown how far you could sink into selfish cruelty through this pursuit of “purity.” Though, come to think of it, Lauren had never agreed with Saskia about the damage Thomas had done, and a woman is entitled to her own stupid opinions, so Saskia is a selfish bitch, we’ve already established that. Lauren even said that she wouldn’t bring “poisons” into the house (dry-ice tendrils of chemo wafting off her sweater, dilatory high-energy photons, etc) because Mette was living there. Saskia was apoplectic. You’re blaming Mette for your refusal to save yourself? How about how much Mette is attached to you? You’re as important to her as I am! Maybe family ties are impure! Maybe accommodating what people close to you might need means occasionally taking your ass off the Throne of Purity and laying down the fucking Orb of Righteousness!

  By the time Lauren told Quenti
n and Saskia, the cancer had spread to her lymph nodes and the long bones of her legs. Maybe she told them when she told them because the pain was soon to become too strong to hide. Or maybe she told them when she told them because it was too late for effective treatment, and she could glide burning down the Nile on her golden barge without having to listen to inconvenient arguments from other people. She was dying, and the one thing Saskia could do, should do, was comfort her, but Saskia was carried back to her awful childhood when Lauren, burying her head in clouds of incense, didn’t see her, let alone love her, and so instead of comforting her dying mother, Saskia berated her, because she was a selfish bitch who maybe didn’t deserve to be loved after all.

  Saskia told Austin and Shannon, who came to the house a number of times over the next two months to help out, as Lauren weakened and spent more of each day in bed, at first refusing pain medication, opting for acupuncture instead, then accepting it when the full carpet-bombing power of the disease began to make itself felt. Melanie flew home for a week at the end of July and everything Saskia wanted to find out about her marriage was hidden behind a screen of Christian goodwifery, braced with two-by-fours of happy anticipation of the fourth (fifth?) blessed event in the offing, and subsumed anyway by Lauren’s more pressing needs. For about five minutes Saskia considered trying to find out how to reach Thomas, then decided without a tremor of remorse that he didn’t deserve to know.

  Of course, shortly afterward, Lauren brought him up. She had clambered that morning out of bed and come downstairs, then immediately had lain on the living room couch. It was a hot day, but she pulled around herself the blanket that Saskia kept there for her, and accepted an offer of tea. When Saskia brought it, she gestured to have it placed on the coffee table by her hand, then didn’t touch it, which was unusual. Her face was very pale.