A hoot of laughter followed by a shout of “In your dreams!” echoed from the card game outside. Then came the rapping knuckles and the repeated warning, “Five minutes, five minutes,” from the stage manager making his rounds. I turned to the dressing shelf and opened a stick of liner. “I don’t have time for this,” I said.
Guy made a sound somewhere between a gargle and a laugh. I could see him in the mirror, pressing his palm into his forehead, smoothing back the hair from his temples. “I think you do,” he replied.
“Has she told you that she’s leaving you?” I said. “Is that what this is all about?”
“She’s not leaving me. What makes you say that?”
“Jesus, Guy,” I said. “Why should she stay with you? You keep her like a jailer. She’s young, beautiful, talented, she’s a successful actress. Once she’s free of you, the world’s at her feet. Do you think she doesn’t know that?”
“Did she tell you that?”
“She doesn’t have to tell me. Take a look in the mirror.” I stepped aside and his eyes shifted to the mirror in which we were both reflected, but he didn’t look at himself. He glared at my reflection. For an eerie moment our eyes met on the surface of the glass.
“Three minutes,” the call came from the hall. “Three minutes.”
Doors snapped and creaked and the atmosphere between us thickened as the bustle of actors heated up in the hall. Madeleine was out there. When the lights came up in three minutes, she would be onstage, complaining to Vanya about how bored she was. I tried to distinguish her voice, her tread, but it was impossible. Guy wasn’t listening. He was back at the bag, which had evidently an endless potential for engaging his interest. He reminded me of Beckett’s character Winnie, in Happy Days, buried to her waist in sand, reaching for her purse whenever her ruminations veer too close to the abyss. “There is, of course, the bag,” she says.
“Look,” I said to Guy, “you can wait in here until I get back.”
“But you’re not going anywhere,” he said. He had extracted something new from the bag, something I couldn’t make out at first because his head was down and he was turning it over in his hands, fiddling with it. Then he parted his legs, the bag slipped to the floor with a thud, and I saw that he was holding an extremely nasty-looking revolver and pointing it directly at me.
The apprehension of a tight spot always commences with a flush of incredulity. There’s a mistake here. This isn’t really happening. So it was, without any sense of the ironic potential which strikes me now as charmingly piquant, that I asked, “Is it real?”
“Oh yes,” Guy said, narrowing his eyes at me in a way that struck me as absurd. Was he taking aim? Why bother, the pistol was huge and we weren’t five feet apart. “It’s real, it’s loaded, and I’ve just removed the safety.”
I wasn’t afraid, though I should have been. The gun affected me as a provocation rather than a threat. I felt elated, light on my feet, and ready to match wits. “I hope you’ve considered the consequences of your actions,” I cautioned.
He rearranged his mouth into a sneer and tilted his head as if listening to an inner dictate. A sour, metallic smell wafted off of him and I noted a line of perspiration gathering over his brow. “I have, actually,” he said.
“Because even though I know you’re unhappy and disgruntled, and rightly so, I don’t deny that you have a legitimate complaint, I don’t see how what you’re doing can help matters. Not for Madeleine, and not for you, and certainly not for me.”
“You will be the biggest loser,” he agreed.
The intercom crackled overhead. Act 3 had begun. The Herr Professor has graciously expressed the desire that we should all assemble in this room at one o’clock today, Vanya said.
“That may be,” I said, “but you’ll lose Madeleine either way.”
He blinked, pushing the pistol out over his knees. Madeleine’s voice, falsely amplified, said, It’s probably business.
“This isn’t about Madeleine,” Guy said. “It never was.”
I pressed on. “You tell yourself you care for her, but think about the impossibility of her situation. She can’t have children; she’s stuck in a sexless marriage. It’s unbearable.”
Wrong card. We both watched his index finger stretch over the trigger. “What are you talking about?” he said.
“What do you think I’m talking about?”
I’m dying of boredom, Elena lamented above our heads. I don’t know what to do. With a flourish of my hand I indicated the intercom speaker.
Guy followed my gesture, his eyebrows knit, his upper lip lifted over his teeth, completely mystified. “That’s good,” I said. “You’re good in this part.”
He returned his puzzled attention to me. “She’s not stuck in a sexless marriage,” he said. “That’s ridiculous. We have sex all the time.”
You must be a witch, Sonya chided Elena.
I nodded sympathetically. “It’s nothing to be ashamed of,” I said. “It can happen to any man.”
He laughed. “This is rich,” he said. “There’s nothing she won’t say when she wants to get laid. And she’s insatiable, but you know that. We had great makeup sex that night after I found you in the hotel room, she was really hot. We called you the warm-up act.”
“Guy,” I said, “give it up.”
Now Sonya confessed her love for Astrov to Elena. I love him more than my own mother. Every minute I seem to hear him, feel the pressure of his hand.
It was my cue to head for the stage. I moved closer to the door, oblivious to the armed threat in the chair. The theater chestnut called “Chekhov’s rule” popped into my brain: a pistol on the wall in the first act must go off in the third. Guy was still chuckling over the joke he and Madeleine had enjoyed at my expense. “No, really,” he said. “She told you we didn’t have sex and you believed her?” So great was his amusement that his hand relaxed and the barrel of the gun tilted toward the floor.
I took the chance to push past him, throwing open the door. His head came up and he jerked around in the chair, leveling the gun at me. Who knows what came over me, a near fatal curiosity, an irresistible impulse to risk my life, but I paused at the door and looked back at him. He was hunched forward awkwardly over the gun, as if it was alive and he had to struggle to keep it from pulling him out of the chair. His chin was down, and his eyes, rolled up and fixed on me, brimmed with hatred such as I have never seen before or since. It shocked me, that look, it frightened me, and I dodged away. He’s going to hurt someone, I thought as I rounded the corner and darted up the steps to the wings where a stagehand waited to hand me the roll of maps I would display to the indifferent Elena. “Listen closely,” I said to him. “There’s a man with a gun in my dressing room. Don’t go down there. Tell Peter to call the police.” His eyes grew wide and solemn and he nodded his head, glancing anxiously past me at the stairs. “Just don’t go down there,” I said. He nodded, wandering away into the wings.
Sonya came offstage and stood quietly to one side. We both watched Elena, who was alone before the audience, debating with herself the pros and cons of yielding to Astrov’s charms. But I’m a coward. My conscience would torment me. He comes here every day, I can guess why, and even now I feel guilty.
Gripping my charts, I moved to the dark at the edge of the stage. Elena paced during her monologue, not in agitation, but aimlessly, tormented by her thoughts, too lazy to act, to put herself out of her own misery. I am ready to fall on my knees before Sonya, and ask her to forgive me, to weep.
I stepped into the lights, advancing strongly upon this beautiful intruder who was destroying my orderly life. Good Day! I said, and we shook hands.
In this scene Astrov has come to show Elena his passion, the geographical charts he has made which detail the gradual degradation of the flora and fauna in the neighborhood. Elena has expressed an interest in seeing them, but this is a ruse; what she wants is to tell him that Sonya is in love with him and, thereby, to draw him out on the sub
ject of his heart, which she believes herself to have captured. I spread out my charts across the table before Elena, fixing them with clips, and began my lecture on ecology. Now look at this. This is a map of our district as it was fifty years ago. The dark and light green represent forests.
I loved this speech. Even the most indifferent members of the audience were stirred by the prophetic vision of our nineteenth-century playwright. It’s a mighty plea for environmental stewardship but it’s also an argument for the vital necessity of art. On this lake there were swans, geese, ducks, and, as the old people say, a powerful lot of birds of all sorts, no end of them; they flew in clouds. I raised my hand, indicating an imaginary flock darkening the sky and inviting Elena with an eager, schoolboy earnestness to humor me, to stretch her limited imagination to a sense of natural wonder. Of course, she couldn’t do it. She gave me a look of frustrated sadness. She was bound by law and by social stricture to a sick, tyrannical old man who kept her awake all night moaning about his gout. Why should she care if there had once been geese honking across the horizon, wild goats and elk startling the weary traveler in the woods at night?
I returned to my chart. I was dead center at the heart of Doctor Mikhail Astrov, a moody, lonely, cynical man, yet passionate about life and driven to do something worth doing in this world, longing at this moment to share his despair of the present and dim hope for the future with a beautiful, desirable, sexually frustrated woman who is bored by what interests him. Edward Day was gone; Guy Margate a nonentity, a disturbing dream from which Astrov has awakened. Besides villages and hamlets, I continued, you can see scattered here and there, various settlements, small farms, hermitages of the Old Believers. I lowered my chin and raised my eyes, letting her in on my skepticism about the “Old Believers.”
She isn’t listening, I thought. Her mind is wandering. But I won’t stop yet. I want her to understand how much is at stake in this world, because men are indifferent to beauty. This is how it was twenty-five years ago. I rolled up the top sheet exposing a second chart. Already one-third of the area is woodland. There are no longer any goats. I went on, but she resisted me. I made the case that it wasn’t a matter of progress, the old giving way to the new, but rather of a degeneration due to stagnation, ignorance, complete lack of understanding. When I lifted my finger from my meticulously drawn map, I saw that her eyes were glazed with boredom. I drew away, closing my heart to her. But I can see by your face that this doesn’t interest you.
I understand so little of all this, she said.
In frustration I rolled up my charts. There’s nothing to understand; it’s simply uninteresting.
She gave me her coy smile; really, she was enough to try a saint. To be quite frank, my thoughts were elsewhere.
Then we had the whole fraudulent business of her sounding me out about my feelings for Sonya.
Emotionally this is an intensely complicated scene; it’s a showstopper. Elena and Astrov are attracted to each other and have been repressing this attraction for reasons that are both personal and social. The attraction is purely sexual; it has been growing on a daily basis for a month in which they have been constantly together but never alone. Now, at last, they are alone. They are as concentrated as two people can be. A tiger could leap through the window and they won’t notice. He declares himself: I submit. Here I am, devour me! And she puts up a flimsy show of resistance: Oh, I am not so low—I am not so bad as you think! But it’s a sham. He takes her in his arms, she struggles, but weakly. Where shall we meet? he begs her. Someone may come in, tell me quickly … what a wonderful, glorious … one kiss.
And at last, they kiss. We kissed.
Because of the arrangement of the entrances near the stage, the gunshot sounded as if it came from the audience in the right orchestra seats. It startled a few cries out of those closest to the door, but no one bolted. Madeleine jerked in my arms. Had he shot her? I held her fast, running my hands along her spine, releasing her lips and lifting her face so that I could look into her eyes. Her gaze was clouded by desire and she brought her hand to the back of my neck, stretching up to meet my lips with hers. As there was no reaction from anyone resembling an authority, and no further disturbance of the airwaves, the moment passed. Some innocents may have thought the shot was part of the play I held Madeleine fast, stroking her hair and pulling her in close at the waist, so overcome by desire that I wanted to force her down onto the floor and have at it right there in front of the audience. Who cares? I thought, my brain sparking like a power line cut loose by a lightning bolt. I’ve got her now. She eased her mouth from mine and I pressed her cheek against my chest, allowing my other hand to stray over her hips. Behind me, Vanya entered stage right, carrying the bouquet of roses he’d gathered for her. Neither of us could see him yet.
Somewhere in my consciousness the gunshot was being judiciously minimized and filed away. There would be some harmless explanation for it; it could have been the blank gun Vanya would fire in the next act, or perhaps it wasn’t a gun at all, but some amp blowing out—there was a lot of voltage out there. Elena was strangely limp in my arms. I felt a hiccup against my collarbone—was she weeping? I lifted her chin and looked into her wet eyes. As the tears overflowed she said something that startled me almost as much as the gunshot. I am not so bad as you think.
It wasn’t her line. The prompter whispered the correction. I held her by the wrist and shoulder, turning her to face Vanya, but she didn’t see him. She was sobbing now, but she caught her breath and said, I am not so bad as you think. She was supposed to break away from me and run to the window. Again the prompter gave her the line: This is awful.
Never mind, never mind, Vanya said. He and I exchanged a look freighted with worry. I launched into my little speech about the weather, after which I was to make a hasty, embarrassed exit stage right, while Elena must remain onstage through the long scene in which Serebryakov threatens to sell the house, and Vanya, in a fury, tries to shoot him with the pistol.
I’m not so bad as you think, Elena said again.
Vanya dropped the flowers. I saw everything, Helene.
I’m not so bad as you think, she repeated.
I paused at the entrance to the wings, opening my hands to Vanya who understood my gesture. We had to get Madeleine offstage. Serebryakov, Sonya, Telyegin, and Marina were beginning their entrance stage left. Madeleine didn’t move. She stood there like Lucia di Lammermoor, a pale and fading rose, her eyes clouded, her lips parted, gazing hopelessly beyond the audience, as lost as a soul in hell. I glanced at the prompter, his eyes aghast over his bifocals, giving her, for the third time, her line—I must leave here—but she was indifferent to him. Vanya approached her. You must leave here, he said. He took her arm and to the relief of the entire cast and crew, now frozen in apprehension, she didn’t struggle. You must leave here this very day, Vanya said. Cautiously he guided her to me as the others entered the stage in the midst of an idle conversation about the vicissitudes of age. Serebryakov, whose line was Where are the others?, cleverly adjusted it to Where is Maria Vasilyevna? I didn’t get to hear how they improvised for the now absent Elena because Peter Smythe appeared, sweating but competent, motioning me into the wings. Together we led Madeleine through the dark backstage to the lighted landing above the dressing rooms. “I’ll send in the understudy for the last act,” he said. “It’ll be a mess, but we don’t have a choice. They’ll have to fake it through the rest of this scene.”
“She doesn’t have many lines,” I said. Madeleine stiffened between us, staring in wide-eyed panic at my open dressing-room door. Three policemen were gathered there, two engaged in conversation, the third speaking loudly into a bulky cell-phone precursor. “No,” she said, pulling away from us. Peter stepped in front of her, blocking her view. We steered her toward the dimly lit kitchen off the greenroom. “It’s all right,” Peter said calmly. “Let’s go in here and I’ll fix you a nice cup of tea.” Madeleine craned her neck, looking past me. “Is someone in there?”
she asked.
“It’s OK, sweetheart,” I said. “It’s nothing for you to worry about.”
She gave me an uncomprehending look. Her face was tear-streaked, her nose red and damp. She sniffed, bringing the back of her hand to her nostrils. I pulled my handkerchief from my pocket. “Here,” I said, “use this.”
“Thank you,” she said. She blew her nose discreetly, folded the cloth, and handed it back to me, a faint, diffident smile on her lips. “I don’t believe we’ve met,” she said.
To this day I don’t know how we managed to get through the fourth act. Of course the audience noticed that Madeleine had been replaced by her understudy, and as they trundled out into the street, they doubtless speculated about what might have happened. Was she taken ill or had some emergency required her to leave the stage? If they read the Metro section the next day in the Times they might have noticed a brief article about the suicide of an unemployed actor in a dressing room at the Public Theater. Otherwise, Guy’s exit went unnoticed by the wide, searching eye of the press.
Because I was the last to see Guy alive, I was subjected to an interview with Detective DiBanco, a short, hirsute investigator with a Napoleonic gleam in his eye. He was waiting for me in the wings at the end of the show, and he escorted me to the door of my dressing room. The other actors were encouraged by the attending officers to gather their belongings and leave the theater. Guy’s body had been removed and Madeleine spirited away by Peter Smythe. Orange tape was stretched across the open door to the dressing room. I tried to avoid looking at the pool of brownish blood congealing on the floor.
It was unusual, Detective DiBanco informed me, for a suicide to shoot himself in the chest. “It’s hard to be accurate,” he said. “Most choose the temple, or they just put the barrel in their mouths.”
“Well,” I said, “he was an actor.”
“Why does that make a difference?”
Valerie Martin Page 21
