He’d always anticipated—perhaps even vaguely hoped—that there would come a point when they would actually have to “decide.” More lately, though, he’d begun to suspect that before he ever really “made a decision” about anything in his life he would already have quietly begun to live out the consequences of the ones he had already made. As now, for example, when he suddenly realized that, even though he and Mary had never once talked about marriage except in the most oblique ways—referring to the things that “other people” did—chances were they would end up sticking it out with one another, and in more or less the same way that “other people” did.
It was not Mary herself, or the idea of being with her for the next seven or fourteen or however many years into the future, that worried him. It was the fact that his future began to look…probable. Yes, he could suddenly see himself quite clearly at this exact same table thirty years from now, waiting for the same couple to arrive, with Mary beside him like a lamp—to be turned on only when the company arrived.
* * *
—
Gail and Jeff. Museum studies folk, both of them. Gail had just got tenure and Jeff was up this year; he’d sort of submerged lately, gone underground in that academic way. In this business, when someone disappears, it’s perfectly normal, even condoned. And when they resurface a couple of months later, thinner, or heavier, depending on their constitution, something unhealthy about the eyes, no questions are asked.
“You’re being cynical.” (Mary.)
As a writer, McKinley considered it his duty to keep a certain grasp on what he called real life—a category that included food, drink, sex, and actual conversation. (When Mary pressed him on his definition of the latter, he replied that it was indefinable—that you specifically should not be able, at the end of an “actual” conversation, to itemize topics discussed.) “Real life” also included a few vigorous hikes in the mountains (because despite various trends in how to approach or convey it, one thing that never went out of fashion was a good dose of the SUBLIME) and, for good measure, a bus ride now and then, even when one owned, for the first time in one’s life, a perfectly good vehicle, on which one made sizeable monthly payments.
The date they were keeping tonight was one that had been postponed by a month and a half. Jeff had said: “February is really busy.”
“February?” McKinley had exclaimed to Mary. “How can a whole month be busy?”
And yet suddenly his own life was beginning to pass by like this, in swaths.
Gail and Jeff arrived apologizing, bringing the cold air in from the street. They undressed, piling their sweaters and scarves over the backs of their chairs. Gail looking a little thinner, or maybe it was just the light. Jeff, perhaps a little heavier.
“So, so, so…How’s everything with you?” (Jeff.) Like he was running his finger down a page, looking for a place to begin.
“Not so very good” would have been McKinley’s honest response. He was often in the habit of taking people at their word when they asked, “How’s things?”
Mary had instructed him on this. “You know no one actually wants to know how you are, don’t you?” she’d asked him once. “It’s just like saying ‘Hello’ when you pick up the phone. You’re supposed to reply, simply, ‘good,’ ‘fine,’ ‘all systems go.’”
“But why?” McKinley had asked. “Why bother going to all the trouble of establishing a connection if you’re not ever allowed to actually say anything?”
Of course, he got it. He knew what Mary meant. He’d been practically named after the gold standard, for god’s sake. And he always felt it acutely afterward—after he’d broken what Mary called the “social contract,” and everyone had awkwardly bundled back into their coats and headed back into the cold. He would be left to finish off his drink and shrug back at Mary across the table—his forehead wrinkled as though he was trying to remember something, and wondering what happened.
“We’re looking for a black man between the ages of eighteen and thirty-four,” McKinley told Jeff. “We can’t find one. We can’t find a single young black man in the tri-county area willing to perform the role.”
They’d put out the initial advertisement in The Luminary, then the local newspaper, the TV station, the radio. McKinley had printed out the casting call and posted it at the gym, the library, the pizza place, the coffee shop. He gestured to the community bulletin board behind them where the call was barely observable beneath handwritten advertisements for roommates, lost cats, and hot yoga. “Wanted,” the ad read: “Black man, between the ages of 18 and 34, for leading male role in a new play by the award-winning playwright McKinley Scott.”
No one had called. He’d talked to his colleagues—implored them to put him in touch with any young black men they knew who might have an unexplored interest in the theatre. “No experience necessary!”
They’d looked at him quizzically. You actually want me to approach a young black man, their looks seemed to suggest, say, “You’re just the type…”?
When McKinley stared back at them, in a way that suggested, Yes. That’s exactly what I want you to do, they’d smiled and nodded, avoided looking him in the eye.
It certainly was a shame that there wasn’t a bigger pool for McKinley to draw from in such a small town, they said. It must be a shock, coming from the city. But wasn’t that showbiz. You never could guess the sort of problems you’d run into along the way…
“So, what are you going to do?” (Gail.)
McKinley shrugged. “I’ve given myself till the end of the week,” he said. “Then I have to decide if I’m going to cancel or not. Just—cancel the whole thing.”
“But isn’t…” Jeff cleared his throat. He looked embarrassed. “I mean, if I’m understanding you right, isn’t this precisely what you’re trying to get away from?” He shifted in his seat, looked anxiously for some reason at Gail across the table. “I mean,” he began again, “if the play is a critique of the way that, you know, we’re all expected, or required, to play a set role based on our…social and cultural backgrounds, then maybe this is an opportunity for the play to actually function as a critique. I mean, maybe it would be interesting to open the role up a little—” Again, he looked nervously at Gail, then at McKinley.
Everywhere but Mary.
Mary took a sip of her wine. “Yes,” she said, “why don’t you give the white folks a chance, McKinley?”
But she said it in a way that everyone knew she was joking. Jeff even laughed, a little—apologetically. Grateful for having been, at once, both assigned the blame and relieved of it.
“We’ve thought about it,” McKinley said quickly. “Believe me, we’ve thought of everything.” He heaved a sigh and, then, with exaggerated nonchalance: “Even of taking things back to the minstrel days.”
Dead silence.
“Blackface,” McKinley explained.
Gail gave a startled laugh, and shot a glance at Mary. Mary was rolling her eyes—indicating both her consent and dismay. Purposely (McKinley thought), she did not look at him. No doubt she was thinking, like he was, of his latest idea, which he had sprung on her the previous night.
He had been waiting for her when she came in from shopping that evening; had practically leapt at her before she was even properly in the door. “You’ll play the part!” he said, extending his arms like a game show host presenting first prize.
Mary looked at him blankly. She was still clutching a bag of groceries in each hand. In his excitement he hadn’t thought to relieve her of them.
“Yes!” McKinley had said, still fuelled by his own energy, though he must have known immediately that something was wrong. The barometric pressure of the room had dropped sharply, but Mary just looked at him—her grip tightening on the grocery bags she had not yet set down. It was almost as if she was willing him to take it back—willing him to establish for both of them that what he’d said had been intended only as a bit of a joke, just like almost every other idea they’d come up with so far.
But McKinley was absolutely serious. The idea had struck him—and in that moment it still did—as a beautiful solution. It was not until Mary, in a small, hard voice McKinley had never heard before, said, “I’m not an actor, McKinley,” set down the groceries, and left the room, that he fully realized his mistake.
But still he hadn’t acknowledged it. They’d eaten dinner in silence. Immediately after the plates had been cleared, Mary had brought out her laptop and begun to type furiously. She was always working toward one deadline or another. Still, though, she went to bed earlier than McKinley, and when he got into bed she was turned away from him, on her side. He’d touched her waist briefly, and she’d groaned a little—indicating that she was, or should be considered to be, asleep.
“I love you, Mary,” he said. Quietly, almost under his breath. Not “I’m sorry.” What good did those words ever do? That was another of their running debates. Mary thought it at least established a point from which to begin “a new conversation”; he thought it was nothing more than a way of sweeping things under the rug.
Now, though, in the wine bar, he found himself hoping—a little desperately—that his exaggerated emphasis when he’d said “We’ve thought of everything” would serve as an apology of sorts.
Perhaps he would even do so officially. He felt suddenly inspired—eager to “start a new conversation,” even to sweep things under the rug, if that’s what it took!
He’d apologize later, he promised himself. After Gail and Jeff went home and he and Mary were left to shrug ruefully over their glasses of wine and walk home together in the cold.
“What about if you…make it part of the story?” (Gail.) “I mean, what if you were self-conscious about it? You could even make a note in the program about how hard you looked. It might open people’s eyes, in the way, you know—like it sounds like the play is trying to do…”
She trailed off; of course, she hadn’t actually read the play. Almost nobody had. Everyone knew about it, had heard something about it, had been “meaning to,” but very few people had actually read it. This meant that it was always discussed in very general terms. McKinley had even begun to think of it this way. Less as a play and more as an idea of a play.
Perhaps that was part of the problem. A specific play could be performed, but not a “play” in general.
“Yeah,” Jeff said, “and you could write yourself in somehow, too. And—all of this. First, your writing of the play, what you intended, then the difficulty of transferring that intention to the stage…”
“Words into action,” Gail said.
“Because, of course,” Jeff said, “the whole point is to get us to look at the construct rather than the individual. To show us how the construct gets made.”
“Mmm,” McKinley said. But he felt suddenly confused. Even without having read his play, what Jeff was saying about it was true—and yet somehow the way it sounded coming out of Jeff’s mouth was all wrong.
Besides, the whole “point” of actually staging the production, rather than simply writing the play, was for the role he’d constructed to become an actual person rather than a mere description, an empty casting call fluttering about on a community bulletin board in the breeze.
“And yet even the individual is a construct,” Jeff said, “and that, it seems to me, could be used to your advantage—if you chose to look at it that way. I mean, even if you do manage to find someone to fit the description, so to speak, you might avoid”—here he faltered—“certain difficulties, which naturally arise whenever anyone attempts to speak from someone else’s perspective or experience…If you wrote yourself into the play, it would be a way of—how would you say it—?”
“Bracketing,” suggested Gail.
Mary nodded. She was not looking at anyone in particular—was just nodding in the way that she always did when she wanted to suggest attention. McKinley knew this instinctively, but in actuality he had never been able to catch Mary out not listening to something when she appeared to be.
“Yes, sure,” Jeff said, “bracketing—or, or framing—your own perspective so that we can see that it’s not a question of positing one particular point of view or, or presuming to speak—”
“But, lest we forget,” McKinley said, holding up his hand like a preacher or a traffic cop. “I am presuming to speak.”
They looked at him. It is remarkable how many places there are to look even in a small room, seated around a smallish table, in the company of only three others. How many angles there are, near or approximate, to actual direct eye contact with another human being; how variously attention and contact can be feigned without its ever being accurate exactly to say so. Because it was only by sudden contrast with the moment in which, after McKinley said “Lest we forget” in that exaggerated and preposterous way and drew them all up short so that they actually looked at him, that it was possible to observe that they hadn’t actually been looking at him before.
“That’s the entire point of theatre, isn’t it?” McKinley said. “I mean why I wrote the play at all. I am, God help me, actually trying to speak for someone else. I am quite literally putting words in somebody else’s mouth.”
All three of his companions stared at him. They looked torn between sympathy and condescension. He could sense the well-meant but dismissive discussion that would take place afterward as Gail and Jeff walked home.
“A bit naive,” Jeff would say. “And something of a loose cannon.”
“Honestly,” Gail would add, “I wonder how Mary puts up with it.”
Maybe Mary herself was wondering that now. It didn’t fail to occur to McKinley, despite or because of how comfortable their relationship had lately become. If Mary should leave him…But he couldn’t finish the thought. His mouth tasted suddenly sour, and his stomach went cold. He felt, in advance, the terrible blow it would be. How the “opportunities” he had sometimes offhandedly considered of being single again (watching shitty TV at the end of the day instead of the news, travelling more, sleeping with men, going to shows) would seem suddenly terribly stark. More than with any other human being, he had been given a chance with Mary. There had been times when he had actually felt it in his body: how close they had come to actually “getting through.” But almost inevitably when he felt this way he would find a way to ruin it somehow. As if he physically required the reintroduction of the distance that had diminished between them. He would get his back up about something, purposely misunderstand her, turn away, become chilly and need a sweater, anything to become himself again, to re-establish the borders.
Of all of them, Gail was the least torn. She was looking at him now with outright condescension, as though he’d just outed himself as a climate change denier. Gail, whose latest work was a reflection on the emotional life of rocks. A recent show, “Making the Stone Stony Again,” had received national attention and was at this moment no doubt being discussed across the country by graduate students interested in speculative philosophy, systems thinking, and super-realism. Gail, who was seriously contemplating the emotional life of a rock, was looking at him as though he had a screw loose because he deigned to speak for another human being.
“Of course,” Gail said.
Jeff took a piece of sourdough bread from the basket that had recently been delivered to their table and tore off a piece with his teeth. Mary burst out laughing.
“What’s so funny?” McKinley said. He felt like a kid who’d been left out of a joke. It was not an unfamiliar feeling. He’d always been the one to force an explanation, instead of just letting it go. Even though he was aware of how irritating this was; how, of course, the joke wasn’t funny once it had to be explained. But he was simply incapable of letting the joke just happen without him, and suspicious that other people only faked good humour most of the time, because he didn’t understand how he was the only one in the world who didn’t get jokes.
“I’m going to call off the play.” (McKinley.)
Mary stopped laughing. “Wha
t?” She was still holding on to the tablecloth and looked genuinely confused.
“Oh, but McKinley,” Gail said—suddenly more sympathy than snobbery—“that would be…sad.”
“It does seem that there ought to be a solution,” said Jeff.
“Yes,” Mary said. “Though, at the same time.” She paused, looked at him. “McKinley’s put so much into this play. He cares about it deeply. It’s hard to know whether it would be better to perform it in less than ideal circumstances and risk it not exactly coming across, or not to perform it at all.”
“Or not yet, anyway,” Gail offered.
“That’s true,” said Mary. Again she looked at McKinley. Kindly, McKinley thought. Apologetically, perhaps. Aware that she had hurt him with her laughter, which he had failed to understand.
“It’s a real dilemma,” Jeff said, in a voice that indicated he was ready, as all of them were ready by now, to discuss something else. “I’m curious what you will do, McKinley. It seems clear that in this situation, as in so many, there really is no right answer.”
“But that doesn’t mean,” Mary said, “that there isn’t a wrong answer. It’s this, after all, that McKinley’s play does such a beautiful job of pointing out.”
Was it? McKinley realized that he had absolutely no idea what his play was about.
“The play doesn’t just throw up its hands like everything else,” Mary was saying. “It’s interested in why things happen, and continue to happen, the way that they do—why we’re stuck in this pattern, this loop. It doesn’t just take a step back, though—point to the loop, and say, ‘Isn’t that interesting.’ It wants to find a way out.”
McKinley could almost have cried he was so grateful to Mary at that moment. But he felt confused, too—unsettled. Like maybe Mary was talking about somebody else’s play. After all, he thought, bewildered and a little ashamed, if his play was, like Mary suggested, about why things happened the way they did, shouldn’t he—its author—have to this question at least some provisional reply?
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