“Well, you’re young. It’s natural. How old are you?”
“Twenty-five.”
Turning up the next card she said, “This card refers to something that has happened in the past.” She placed it carefully below the first three. For a moment we sat staring silently at my past.
The image was brutal. A man lay facedown on the ground with ten swords thrust into his back. The background was black. A liquid that was probably blood pooled near his head. “I’m really not enjoying this very much,” I said.
“It’s not death,” she reassured me again. “Obviously in this position it can’t be. It’s a card of sudden loss, of betrayal.”
Something about the card made me queasy, yet I couldn’t look away. I want you to sit down, son, I heard my father say. And then, very clearly, a voice I’d heard only once in my life: I hate this part of you. Tears sprang to my eyes. “I’d like to stop here, if you don’t mind,” I said.
“Ed?” Marlene looked into my eyes with an expression of sympathy I found too bold, too easy. “Are you all right?” she asked.
I cleared my throat, clearing out my mother and her cracked girlfriend and the notes fluttering on the desk in my dormitory room: Your mother called. Your mother again. “Do your son a favor,” I said coldly to Marlene. “Don’t kill yourself.”
She drew in a breath, leaning away from me. “I’m so sorry,” she said.
“There’s no reason you should be sorry.”
“I mean, I’m sorry for you. I’m sorry for your loss. When did it happen?”
“When I was a freshman in college.”
She was quiet for a moment. “It does explain something about you, as an actor.”
“I don’t much care what it explains,” I said.
She picked up the card and examined it closely. “I don’t believe in fate,” she said. “And I don’t think cards can predict the future. Only stupid people believe that. But the symbols on these cards are very old and they speak in a language we apprehend without having to think about it, without words. They speak to the unconscious, in effect, they speak to our emotions. That’s why I like them.”
“Good for you,” I said.
Oblivious to the wave of ice I was sending her way, she went on. “What a strange set of circumstances,” she said. “That you should come here to do this particular play with me at this point in your career. It’s truly fortuitous.”
“But you don’t believe in fate,” I said. “And you wanted me to come here, you said so yourself.”
“Who are you angry with? Is it me?”
“I’m just saying it isn’t fortuitous.”
“You’re a talented actor, Ed. You have a gift, and you have ambition. And you’re not envious and competitive, that’s something, that’s good. Envy can be killing to an actor. Well, it’s ruinous in all the arts.”
“Are you getting at something, Marlene?”
“I am. Be patient. You’re a good actor and you could be a great actor, but only if you understand that your life must be given up to your art. You can have no other life. There can’t be Ed having an emotion on the stage and Ed having an emotion, a strong, pure, deep emotion here in this room and a curtain drawn between. You mustn’t sit here and try to push away a powerful emotion because it’s painful. As an actor you have no right to do that.”
“I’m not going to bawl about my dead mother, if that’s what you want.”
“I don’t want anything. It’s what you want. And what you need, from yourself, as an actor. Let go of your response to the emotion and study it. Study what it did to you, how it evolved in you, how it came about, Ed, dear, that I could see it and know it was real. Not faked. That it was real. You have to make use of yourself, of who you are.”
“Sandy is always on about that in class,” I said.
“Yes, well, he’s right. Listen, you know that moment in the first scene when Scudder tells Chance Wayne his mother is dead and Chance says, ‘Why wasn’t I notified?’”
I’d been listening to her halfheartedly but now she had my complete attention. Incredible as it may seem, I had not until that moment connected the death of my character’s mother with my feelings about the death of my own. His mother had been sick, she sounded old and petulant. That’s why he’d come back to town. He hadn’t been notified of her death because he’d left no reliable address. He was out starfucking, trying to get into the right crowd, sleeping “in the social registry,” when his mother needed him. She had died a few weeks before he got around to caring about her.
“You always make yourself go cold when you deliver that line,” Marlene continued. “You clench your jaw as if someone had just trod on your foot and you didn’t want to let on. It’s a dead line when you deliver it, nothing is revealed. Now I know why.”
“I never feel comfortable with that line.”
She handed the card to me. “Take it, look at it. Memorize it, not in words, don’t say, ‘It’s a man with swords in his back,’ just visualize it.”
I took the card and did as she instructed, but words rose up in spite of me, and those words were, It was my fault.
“Now say the line.”
I studied the card. It was myself I recognized, slain there.
Marlene gave me my cue. “Your mother died a couple of weeks ago.”
I looked just past her at the curtain rustling in the breeze. A shiver, like spidery pinpricks ran up my spine. “Why wasn’t I notified,” I asked her. It wasn’t a question, I wasn’t seeking information. It was an admission of guilt.
“There you are,” Marlene said. “There you are.”
I held the card out to her. “Thank you,” I said.
“Keep it,” she said. “It’s yours now.”
I did keep it; I still have it somewhere, I’m not sure where, but I know I never threw it away. I didn’t keep it for luck or out of superstition, but as a souvenir of that strange night when I was in love with Marlene Webern and she was generous to a young actor who had no idea what he was doing. I wanted to have sex with her, she wanted me to commit to my art. She sent me back to the boardinghouse that night with a kiss as chaste as Thisbe gave Pyramus through the chink in the wall and the next morning at rehearsal, she held her arms out to me again and I snuggled down into her warm, fragrant bosom and kissed her parted lips, sick with desire. What an actress that woman was! I never did get her into bed, but perhaps that was just as well. Best not to sully the ideal: I think she knew that.
Our play opened a week later and was, in the insular, hothouse world of summer stock, reckoned a success. The local press gushed over Marlene’s performance as well they might, and I was singled out for hyperbolic praise: “A young actor of startling prowess.” “Newcomer Edward Day commands the stage.” Stuff like that. I was fucking the luscious Eve at night and worshipping at the altar of my goddess by day; my fellow thespians were a spirited, pleasure-loving lot; I was working hard and playing hard; and I had, at long last, an Equity card. The future was dazzling, and I gazed upon it from the evanescent interior of a bubble.
We had only one phone in the front hall of the boarding-house, so making and receiving calls wasn’t easy. At the end of the first week I had left a message at Madeleine’s service, giving her the number, with the frustrating addendum that there was rarely anyone in the house to answer it. A few days later I found a written message under my door: Madeleine called; please call her at eight a.m. on Friday. Dutifully I made the call but got the service again. “She had an appointment,” the sleepy employee explained. “She said to tell you she’s fine, very busy. She’ll try to give you a call on Sunday.”
“That’s not good,” I said. “We’re in rehearsal all day.”
“I’ll tell her,” he said. “How is it up there?”
“It’s great,” I said. “Are you an actor?”
“Why else would I be doing this job?”
“Right,” I said. “Tell her I’ll send her a card.”
And that was the end of that.
These days everyone has a cell phone stuck to his head and the idea of being out of touch is unthinkable, but at that time an exchange passed through a stranger was sometimes the best you could do. The next day I sent Madeleine a postcard with a photo of the picturesque town green.
Dear Madeleine, I wrote. I’m working hard and loving it. I have the lead in Williams’s Sweet Bird. It’s a good group. The director’s no genius, but he’s not vicious and the theater is charming. Sorry about the phone situation. It’s basically impossible. Glad to hear you’re busy too. Love, Edward
I didn’t want to lose her, I thought, as I dropped the card into the postbox. I just didn’t want to deal with her until we were face-to-face again.
A week later I got a card from her; the Statue of Liberty, which I took to be a good sign. Dear Edward, Your card sounds like you’re writing to someone you’ve recently met—or to your maiden aunt. Everything dead and hot here. I’ve got an audition at the Circle—wish me luck. I miss you. (You forgot to say that.) Love, Madeleine
That last bit made me smile. Sufficiently tart, put me right in my place; that was Madeleine. I missed her too.
One evening toward the end of July, Gary Santos stopped in at the dressing room—he played the thuggish Tom Junior and took his part in my onstage castration with what I considered excessive glee—to say a friend had stopped by the boarding-house asking for me.
“What’s his name?”
“He didn’t say. Tall guy, long hair, beard, looks like a hippie. Said he’d see you after the play.”
I could think of no friend who matched this description and straightway forgot about it, being absorbed by the cruel fate of Chance Wayne. The performance went well; the audience chuckled at all the jokes and took in breath during the brutal bits, applauded strongly for the full duration of our bows at the end. Marlene squeezed my hand as she smiled into the lights and I lifted her fingers to my lips, gazing longingly into her eyes. I was still in hot pursuit which amused her, but I hadn’t been invited back into the sanctity of the cottage. In the dressing room I cleaned off my makeup, pulled on a T-shirt, and went out with a group who were heading for the local pub. We arrived in high spirits and occupied our customary booth near the back. The waitress, who knew our preferred brews, at once began ferrying icy mugs from the bar. Eve was next to me bending Gary’s ear about the high professional standards at Yale, but her eyes kept drifting to the mirror behind him. “Stop admiring yourself,” Gary demanded. “It’s disgusting.”
“I’m not,” she protested.
“Right,” Gary and I said in unison.
Eve giggled theatrically. “No, you sillies, I’m not. There’s a cool-looking guy at the bar watching us. He looks like Warren Beatty in that movie, you know, with Julie Christie. I think I’ve seen him in something.”
Gary and I both craned our necks for a celeb sighting. He was standing with his back to the bar, propped on one elbow, drinking beer from a bottle in a studly pose and, Eve was right, he was watching us. His black hair was long, past his chin, and he had a short, neatly trimmed beard. He raised his bottle to us in a friendly salute and flashed a disturbing smile like a coconut cracking open. With his free hand he pulled up a leather satchel resting on the barstool. “That’s the guy who was looking for you,” Gary said and Eve whispered, “Look, he’s coming over.”
“God, Ed,” Guy announced as he arrived at our table. “When you came out on that stage, I didn’t recognize you. I thought I was in the wrong theater. You make a fantastic blond. I think you should stick with it.”
“I didn’t recognize you, either,” I said, which was true.
He patted the beard tentatively with his fingertips. “Oh, yes,” he said. “I’ve changed too.” His quick eyes raked the company and settled on Eve. “You were just great,” he said.
“Thanks,” Eve said.
“This is Guy Margate,” I said. “This is Eve.”
“Guy,” Eve said, rising up in her place to shake hands. “Nice to meet you.”
Guy fumbled in the bag and pulled out a Polaroid camera. “Can I get a picture of you guys?” he said, popping off the cap and stepping back to frame his shot. Eve grinned and leaned across the table, resting her hand on my arm. Gary and I laughed at her eagerness. “She’s always ready for her close-up,” Gary said. There was a flash and the zip of the magical square sliding out like a white tongue. Guy pulled it free and fanned it languidly, smiling at us.
“What brings you to Connecticut?” I asked.
“Well, I wanted to see your show.”
“That’s really nice,” Eve said.
I didn’t think it was nice; in fact I was sure it wasn’t. He was up to something; he wanted something. Fortunately there was no room in our booth so I had a good excuse to separate from the group and join my old friend Guy at the bar. He passed the photo around, discharging a few fulsome compliments upon the players until the picture came back and he followed me.
“Jack Daniels,” I said to the bartender. “Straight up, water back.”
Guy drained his beer. “I’ll have the same.”
I watched the bartender pouring the drinks, unable to think of anything I wanted to say to Guy. “Man,” he said at last. “I can’t get over you as a blond. It almost looks natural.” He pulled thoughtfully at a thick strand grazing his cheek. “Maybe I should try it.”
“It wouldn’t look natural,” I said.
“I don’t see why not.”
“You’re actually darker than I am,” I said. “Your coloring is all wrong.”
“There are lots of blond Italians.”
“Is that what you are?”
“It probably wouldn’t be worth the trouble.” Our drinks arrived and he sipped his.
“Why the beard?” I asked.
“It’s an experiment. There’s a Chekhov play coming up, well it’s actually a play about Chekhov. Bev knows the casting director and she thinks she can get me an audition.”
“You see yourself as Chekhov?”
“Or just generic nineteenth-century Russian; they all had beards. Sure, I could do that.”
“You have a lot of confidence in yourself,” I said.
“Why shouldn’t I?”
I swallowed half my bourbon glancing back at my friends in the booth. I could hear their sudden bursts of laughter, but I couldn’t make out what they were saying. The room was dimly lit and smoky; they seemed far away. A green shaded lamp over the mirror cast threads of light on the reflection of Eve’s golden curls, her rosy cheeks, as she reached across the table to snatch a cigarette from the communal pack. “That girl finds you very attractive,” I said to Guy.
His eyes followed mine, but listlessly. “You’re having a fine time here,” he said.
“I am,” I agreed.
“Are you fucking that TV actress?”
“Marlene? I wouldn’t say if I were.” Eve, feeling our eyes upon her, sent me a provocative smile, a wave, a wink.
“You’re fucking that girl,” Guy observed.
“Why are you interested?”
“I’m not interested,” he said.
“What is it you want here?”
He smiled, but not at me. “You’re not bad in that role,” he said. “The hustler who thinks he could be a star. It suits you, eh?”
“Actually no. I’m acting.”
This made him laugh which was never a pleasant sight. “Is that what you call it?”
“You’re always ready with the critique,” I said. “Who asked you to come here anyway?”
He took a beat, drawing down his eyebrows and upper lip in a mockery of serious consideration. “Madeleine,” he said.
I didn’t believe him, but I was curious. “Did she send you to check up on me?”
“It’s too late for that, isn’t it?”
“What is it about being asked a question that you don’t get?”
“She’s pregnant,” he said.
This was a conversation-stopper. I took the opportunity t
o signal the bartender for another drink. Guy looked back at the table where the waitress was setting down two large pizzas. “That girl is pretty enough,” he said, “but she’s a terrible actress.”
“Madeleine sent you to tell me this?”
“It’s not as if she can reach you on the phone,” he said. “And it’s not the sort of news one puts on a postcard, is it?”
This was true enough, but still I didn’t believe him. “Why didn’t she come herself?”
“She doesn’t have time.”
“So you’re the wicked messenger.”
“I take it this is unwelcome news.”
“When did you and Madeleine get so close?”
“We’ve been friends a long time; we have the same agent.”
“And I’ve been away for two months.”
He looked back at Eve. “You know, I think it’s really a bad idea to have sex with an actress whose work you have contempt for. It coarsens you.”
“So who’s the lucky father?” I said.
“That’s just what one can never be sure of, isn’t it,” Guy said. “Much has been made of that very problem in the theater.”
“What’s she going to do?”
He lifted his chin and tapped around the edge of his beard as if he was securing it to his face. “I think the question is: What are you going to do?”
“Is the beard real?”
“Sure it is,” he said.
“I just can’t believe Madeleine would send you to tell me this news.” It was so unfair, I thought. Everything was going so well. “I’m going to have to think about this,” I said.
“You wouldn’t want to do anything impulsive.”
“Exactly,” I agreed, but then I realized he was attempting irony, which was a stretch for Guy. He couldn’t get the inclusive fellow-feeling element that tempers the blade of wit. Instead of humorous prodding, his method was the full frontal sneer. My jaw and throat felt tight; I narrowed my eyes. I was angry with Madeleine. How could she put me in this intolerable position? She knew how I felt about Guy. And what if she was sleeping with him? I didn’t trust either of them.
The group confined in the booth broke ranks and drifted toward the bar. Eve made a beeline for the stool next to Guy, engaging him at once on the question of what she should drink. This suited me; it gave me time to figure out what to say. My assumption was that Madeleine would want an abortion. She was far too ambitious and obsessed with her career to put it on hold to have a child no one really wanted. I figured she would know how to do whatever she wanted to do, but what she would need would be money. I had a little, not much. How should I send it to her? Should I give it to Guy or send a check in a letter? I wanted to help her without making any kind of commitment.
Valerie Martin Page 11
