A Broadway character actor and one of her former professors at Yale founded the Lenox Ensemble in 1987. In their early years, they did repertory versions of the works of Williams, Albee, and Wilson, among others, and in recent years had concentrated on staging younger playwrights who they believed were doing important work. Last summer they had produced their first commissioned play and were committed to doing two of these every year in the future. I learned all of this from a flyer I found at an inn where I stopped to get some information. I knew how to get to Lenox, but I had no idea how to find where Iris worked.
The Ensemble’s offices were located in a modest farmhouse about two miles from downtown. The theater itself was in a converted barn a couple hundred yards away. Inside the house was a series of desks where a handful of people in their early twenties made phone calls, typed on computers, and sorted through papers. There were offices to the left and to the back of this. As I entered, Iris came out of one of these talking heatedly with a man who was easily nine inches taller and twenty years older than she was. It had something to do with a problem with scenery and it wasn’t clear whether they were on opposite sides of the argument or at various stages of extreme on the same side. At one point, Iris looked over and threw me a surprised glance before going back to her discussion.
A guy at a computer asked if he could help me and I sat in a chair to wait things out. When Iris finished her exchange, she went back into her office and, for a moment, I thought she was either going to ignore me or had forgotten I was there. But then she walked out in my direction, looking considerably more relaxed than she had only moments before.
“You might be the last person I expected to see here,” she said, kissing me on the cheek.
“I was in the neighborhood.”
“Do you define the entirety of New England as your neighborhood?”
“I needed to get the hell out of Amber.”
She looked at me, confused. “What were you doing in Amber?”
“A question I ask myself several times a day, starting from the moment I wake up. Some stuff has happened. Want to hear about it?”
“Yes, I think I would,” she said, smiling. She looked at her watch. “I have a nightmare day. I don’t know how much you heard of that conversation, but one of the set designers has had a creative crisis. We think it has something to do with the woman he started dating last month. Our first performance is in three weeks and we’re just this side of royally screwed.”
“In other words, I should have called first.”
“Something like that. But I’d really like to talk to you. Can you hang around until dinnertime? I can suggest some things to do.”
“I think I can take care of myself. What time should I come back?”
She looked at her watch and then back toward her office. “7:00?”
I wondered if I should simply get in my car and head back toward Connecticut. She was obviously very busy. But having made this move, I didn’t want to get just three distracted minutes with her.
“I’ll meet you back here then.”
“Great.” She kissed me on the cheek again. “I’m sorry, but I really have to run.”
Using up five hours was not in any way difficult. I had my copy of Rabbit Is Rich and settled in to read for a while at a downtown café. Afterward, I browsed through the various shops, spending more than an hour at a used-and-rare CD store. I came away with a replacement copy of a Richard Shindell album I’d lost in one of my moves and bootlegs of Dave Matthews, Phish, and Umprhey’s McGee. A little later, I walked into a store called Paperworks. It was a stationery, card, and gift store, but unlike my father’s in so many ways. You could buy a spiral notebook there if you wanted, but you could also buy hand-marbled paper. You could get a Hallmark card if that’s where your head was, but many of the cards were from much smaller suppliers, including an entire four-foot display from a local artist who printed them himself. And the gift items included kaleidoscopes from San Francisco, pottery from Tuscany, and maplewood cooking utensils from Vermont. There was plenty of mass-produced stuff here, but also many things for sale that I hadn’t seen anywhere else. I wondered if the new owner of Amber Cards, Gifts, and Stationery would be this creative, and even thought for a second about asking the owner of Paperworks if he had any interest in a Connecticut location.
As the afternoon continued, I decided to take a walk away from downtown. The houses started modestly and then grew larger with more spacious lawns as I got farther from the commercial area. For some time now, I’d enjoyed wandering through unfamiliar neighborhoods. I usually drove, but I actually preferred to walk. I liked to imagine what life was like inside these houses, and when I was walking, the stray overheard voice or barking of a dog would take my imagination in unexpected directions. I passed one house where a preadolescent boy wearing a Boston Red Sox T-shirt was tossing pitches to a backstop, narrating the game action as he did so. Of course it was the World Series and of course he was winning. In my mind, the boy would go in to dinner in an hour or so and, while his parents discussed zoning issues, the day’s business, or perhaps an upcoming performance from the Lenox Ensemble, he would eat his pasta quietly, reveling in that day’s accomplishments.
I walked for nearly an hour and then went back to my car. On the way, I picked up a bottle of water at a convenience store and I sat in the car, sipping, listening to Richard Shindell, and wondering what I would do with the time that remained before I could see Iris again. Completely unbidden, I leaned my head against the side window and dozed off.
I got back to the farmhouse a little after 7:00. It was considerably quieter now and dimly lit. The guy who had greeted me when I arrived earlier that day was still seated at his computer.
“You’re looking for Iris, right?”
“Yes, I am.”
“She said you’d get here around now. The latest in our never-ending series of crises came up but she said she’d try to get back as close to seven as she could. Said you could wait in her office.”
I thanked him and went to Iris’ office, which was lit only by a table lamp. She had a poster of B.B. King on one wall and of Twyla Tharp on another. Just to the right of her desk was a photograph of an abandoned country road in a handmade frame. In spite of first Iris and now the guy at the computer telling me that her day – in fact, all of her days – had been hectic, there was little sign of commotion on her desk. There were probably hundreds of pieces of paper there, but they were all neatly arranged and seemed eminently accessible. A bookshelf against the far wall held a wide array of titles from a history of the Berkshires to one with local codes and ordinances to several business and accounting books to the collected works of Tennessee Williams to novels by Janet Evanovich, Barbara Kingsolver, and Saul Bellow.
As it got close to 7:30, I thought once again about heading back toward Amber. I was going to get home very late and I was sure that Iris would appreciate not having to entertain me after all these difficult hours at work. I decided to give it another fifteen minutes and then, when that passed, decided to give it fifteen minutes more.
I was flipping through the book of ordinances when she came in a little before 8:00.
“Thinking about running for city council?” she said.
“Nah, purely pleasure. This book is un-put-down-able.”
She kissed me on the cheek and then walked behind her desk, looking through a stack of messages as she spoke.
“I’m really sorry I’m so late. I thought I’d be back here before you returned, but my hand-holding mission turned into a full-blown therapy session.”
“If you want to call tonight off, I’m totally okay with that.”
“No, jeez, after making you wait all this time? To tell you the truth, I’m looking forward to the diversion. If you hadn’t shown up, I’d have just wound up staying here all night obsessing about everything that’s going to go wrong in the next two weeks.”
She walked behind her office door, retrieved a sweater, and put it on.<
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“Let’s go,” she said.
“You’re positive?”
“Extremely positive.”
We drove in separate cars to Stockbridge for sushi. As I looked at the menu, it dawned on me that these kinds of Japanese restaurants had become as comforting and familiar to my generation as roadside diners had been to previous ones. You could travel all over the country and find the same dishes as you found in The Plum Tree in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. The quality might vary, the preparations might even range slightly, but you could essentially order before you walked in the door.
“So did you have fun playing hooky today?” Iris said.
“More than I even thought I would. To tell you the truth, I had sort of forgotten that I was playing hooky.”
“You’ll have to show me how to do that. Now explain to me what the hell you’re still doing in Amber. You haven’t decided to move back there, have you?”
“Are you kidding? I think that’s grounds for institutionalization in certain states. No, the thing with my father turned out to be worse than expected. He had another heart attack. He’s got a good chance of being okay, but he can’t work in the store anymore.”
She wrinkled her nose. “That must be tough for him.”
“As indicated by his expression, his demeanor, and the way the belt of his robe drags behind him if he ever decides to get up and walk.”
Iris shook her head. “I would think it would be hard. I mean he’s gotta be worrying about his health and he’s definitely gotta be upset about losing his career.”
“I know. And I do feel for him when I’m not annoyed at how defeated he seems and how much of a crimp he’s put in my plans.”
“You mean the reason you’re still in Amber?”
“Yeah, that. He asked me to take over the store for him.”
Iris’ eyes doubled in size. “You didn’t – ”
“No! Please. But I told him I’d take care of things until he found a buyer. The way commercial real estate flips around on Russet Avenue, I figured I wasn’t committing to very much. But the market for stationery stores seems a little depressed at the moment.”
“So you’re feeling just a tiny bit tied down?”
“Just a tiny bit.”
Iris sipped some green tea and seemed to give my plight serious consideration. After a moment, she looked back up at me and held my eyes for a beat. As she did, I realized that I didn’t want to spend our time together complaining. I hadn’t made the long drive to bitch.
“I can handle it,” I said.
She took another sip and put the tea mug down. “Of course you can.”
While we ate, we talked about the production that the Ensemble was working on and the various ways in which Iris contributed to it. As always seemed to be the case with small creative groups, Iris’ functions varied on an almost daily basis. While her primary responsibilities were managing staff, freelancers, and finances, at any given moment she could find herself giving an interview to a local paper, running lines with one of the actors, or offering the artistic director an opinion on productions under consideration. Though she did a fair amount of eye rolling and sarcastic muttering while she talked about the Ensemble, it was abundantly clear that she was engaged in her work. She didn’t hold hands, perform counseling sessions, and stay in the office until midnight because someone had to. She did it because she knew it would help.
We talked about what she did when she wasn’t working and she mentioned that the café where I’d stopped during the afternoon was one of her favorite places to go for lunch. She also told me that she spent a lot of time in Paperworks and that the greeting card artist I’d noticed lived down the street from the house she rented.
“Do you think there is anyone in Amber who considers my father’s store to be one of their favorite places to hang out?” I asked rhetorically.
“Your father’s store has a different function. He provides a service and the community appreciates it. Where the hell else would I have gotten my protractors when I was growing up?”
“You probably only came into the store because you were hoping to get a chance to talk to Chase.”
Iris chuckled, but didn’t say anything for a moment. Then she smiled and said, “That’s only because his cute older brother was always hanging out in the back room.”
I smiled, though I knew that none of what she said was true. If anything, I spent more time behind the cash register than Chase because he would get too distracted talking to customers, and there was no chance that Iris would ever have come into the store looking for Chase’s “cute older brother.” Like every other female of a certain age, Iris thought of Chase as The Boy.
When our meal was over, I asked Iris if she wanted to stop by the coffee bar a few storefronts down.
“I’m okay with it if you are,” she said. “I’m not the one who has to drive for a couple of hours.”
While my day in Lenox had been a pleasant diversion and while I was cheered that there wasn’t any lingering awkwardness from the last conversation we’d had, this encounter was feeling too much like an interlude to me: friend stops in from out of town and you go out for a quick dinner together to catch up. I hadn’t driven to the Berkshires with any agenda in mind. In fact, I hadn’t even started driving that morning with the intention of going to the Berkshires. But now that I had seen Iris, I needed to know what we were currently doing.
I got us both coffee and we sat down. She took the lid off her coffee, allowing steam to waft up around her chin.
“Always ridiculously hot,” she said.
I looked down at my cup, but kept the lid on it. “Listen, I have to admit that I understood only about every third word of what you were saying that last time I saw you.”
She held the cup to her lips and her eyes shifted focus for a moment. I’m sure she would have been much happier if we had simply pretended that the kiss and the subsequent discussion about it had never happened. She took a small sip and recoiled from the temperature.
“Way too hot,” she said and put the cup back down. “You really didn’t understand what I was saying?”
“I got the message. I just didn’t get the meaning behind the message.”
“It’s not that deep a message, Hugh. Our history is just a little too complicated.”
“I understand that. But, you know, we always had a good time talking and it seems that we’ve had a really good time talking lately.”
“That only makes it more complicated.”
I held up my hands. “I’m not looking for it to be complicated. I just want to clarify something: when you were saying ‘hey, maybe we can get together every now and then,’ were you defining that as once every four years or so?”
“We’re friends, Hugh. I don’t think about parameters.”
“And neither do I, usually. But to be honest with you, for as long as I’m stuck with this thing with my father’s store, you might be the only real friend I have for hundreds of miles. I just wanted to make sure that we could do this again in the relatively near future.”
She laughed. “I’ll be happy to come out and play whenever I can. And you know, I’ll be down to see my mother every month or so and we’ll set things up then, too. If you remember, the last time we spoke, you were heading for New Mexico.”
“I’m still heading for New Mexico. Just very slowly.”
“That might make these casual get-togethers a little tougher.” She reached out for my hand, squeezed it, and then put hers back on her coffee cup. “But until then, stop by whenever you’re ‘in the neighborhood. ’”
I nodded and burned my tongue on the coffee. This wasn’t what I wanted to talk about or even how I wanted to talk about it.
But it was something.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Willin’
I’d been in school during my junior year for a little more than a month when Chase and Iris showed up unexpectedly at my apartment door. After two years living on campus, I’d moved to a c
reaky one bedroom about a fifteen minute walk from the school. I’d had a difficult time with my roommate the previous semester and decided I really wanted to live by myself. At the same time, I didn’t want to live alone, so I moved into a building that housed six other people I knew from Emerson. To me it was a nearly perfect arrangement: I got to have things exactly the way I wanted them in my living space while also having people to go to classes with, drink with, and crawl home much too late with.
Though one wall of the living room had flaking paint and the refrigerator considered its function to be optional, I loved the place. I bragged about it endlessly during my phone conversations with Chase and, for one of the few times in our lives, he actually seemed jealous. He kept telling me that he was going to come up to visit – something he had only done once the two previous years I was away – and I told him that he was always welcome, never expecting him to take me up on it.
I certainly didn’t expect him to arrive at 11:00 on a Thursday night without calling ahead first. He stood in the doorway grinning, as though he had just performed some huge trick. I looked over at Iris and she simply waved.
After hugging Chase, I told him that he was lucky I was home, that I might have been out at a party, leaving them sitting outside the door for hours. He reminded me that he knew that I always spent Thursday nights alone studying because only then would I be comfortable playing all weekend. I’d had that studying habit since I was ten. I had, in fact, been reading an essay by Camus when he knocked on the door. I then reminded him that he was supposed to be at school the next day and he told me that it was a half day and that as a senior he was morally obligated to take those off. My parents would of course accept this kind of thing, though I wondered if they knew that Iris was with Chase. I had no idea what Iris had told her parents and thought it wouldn’t be cool to ask.
While I had seven more pages of the Camus to read and Chase promised to be quiet, I decided I could finish my work Sunday night. We went to a bar a few blocks from the school and screamed conversation at one another while Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and other Seattle imports played in the foreground. Chase was much more enamored of this angst-riddled music than I was. I simply liked how the songs went from a whimper to a bang without notice and how there was a discernable melody even at the highest decibel levels. After a while, we let the music and the beer take over, assuming that we would have plenty of time to talk the next day when I finished my only Friday class. Chase and Iris held hands and occasionally said something into the other’s ear, but they seemed content simply to live in that moment. This was yet another sign that Chase had found something with Iris. When I’d been with him on dates previously, he’d always been doing something, always keeping the conversation rolling, and always moving the evening along.
Crossing the Bridge Page 7
