The elevator doors opened, and I stepped off. “Wait,” he said, coming after me. “You don’t believe me.”
“Look, man,” I said, turning in exasperation, “I don’t know what went on between you and her and I don’t care, okay? If she messed you over, I’m sorry, but I’m an actor and I need a job and if I get it I’ll take it!”
His face remained placid. “Let me buy you a drink,” he said.
“Oh Jesus . . .”
“You don’t have to be afraid. I won’t get violent.” He forced a smile. “Do you think I’ve been violent? Have I even raised my voice?”
“No.”
“Then please. I just want to talk to you.”
I had to admit to myself that I was curious. Most actors would have shown more fire over things that meant so much to them, but Taylor was strangely zombielike, as if life were just a walk-through. “All right,” I said, “all right.”
We walked silently down Broadway. By the time we got to Charlie’s it was three thirty, a slow time for the bar. I perched on a stool, but Taylor shook his head. “Table,” he said, and we took one and ordered. It turned out we were both bourbon drinkers.
“Jesus,” he said after a long sip. “It’s cold.”
It was. Manhattan winters are never balmy, and the winds that belly through the streets cut through anything short of steel.
“All right,” I said. “We’re here. You’re buying me a drink. Now. You have a story for me?”
“I do. And after I tell it you can go out and do what you like.”
“I intend to.”
“I won’t try to stop you,” he went on, not hearing me. “I don’t think I could even if I wanted to. It’s your life, your career.”
“Get to the point.”
“I met her last summer. June. I know Joe Papp, and he invited me to the party after the Lear opening, so I went. Sheila was there with a guy, and I walked up and introduced myself to them, and told her how much I enjoyed her performance. She thanked me, very gracious, very friendly, and told me she’d seen me several times and liked my work as well. I thought it odd at the time, the way she came on to me. Very strong, with those big, wet, bedroom eyes of hers eating me up. But her date didn’t seem to care. He didn’t seem to care about much of anything. Just stood there and drank while she talked, then sat down and drank some more. She told me later, when we were together, that he was a poet. Unpublished, of course, she said. She told me that his work wasn’t very good technically, but that it was very emotional. “Rich with feeling,”, were the words she used.
“I went to see her in Lear again, several times really, and was more impressed with each performance. The poet was waiting for her the second time I went, but the third, she left alone. I finessed her into a drink, we talked, got along beautifully. She told me it was all over between her and the poet, and that night she ended up in my bed. It was good, and she seemed friendly, passionate, yet undemanding. After a few more dates, a few more nights and mornings, I suggested living together, no commitments. She agreed, and the next weekend she moved in with me.
“I want you to understand one thing, though. I never loved her. I never told her I loved her or even suggested it. For me, it was companionship and sex, and that was all. Though she was good to be with, nice to kiss, to hold, to share things with, I never loved her. And I know she never loved me.” He signaled the waiter and another drink came. Mine was still half full. “So I’m not a . . . a victim of unrequited love, all right? I just want you to be sure of that.” I nodded and he went on.
“It started a few weeks after we were living together. She’d want to play games with me, she said. Theater games. You know, pretend she was doing something or say something to get a certain emotion out of me. Most of the time she didn’t let me know right away what she was doing. She’d see if she could get me jealous, or mad, or sullen. Happy too. And then she’d laugh and say she was just kidding, that she’d just wanted to see my reactions. Well, I thought that was bullshit. I put it down as a technique exercise rather than any method crap, and in a way I could understand it—wanting to be face-to-face with emotions to examine them—but I still thought it was an imposition on me, an invasion of my privacy. She didn’t do it often, maybe once or twice a week. I tried it on her occasionally, but she never bit, just looked at me as if I were a kid trying to play a man’s game.
“Somewhere along the line it started getting kinky. While we were having sex, she’d call me by another name, or tell me about something sad she’d remembered, anything to get different reactions, different rises out of me. Sometimes . . .” He looked down, drained his drink. “Sometimes I’d . . . come and I’d cry at the same time.”
The waiter was nearby, and I signaled for another round. “Why did you stay with her?”
“It wasn’t . . . she didn’t do this all the time, like I said. And I liked her. It got so I didn’t even mind it when she’d pull this stuff on me, and she knew it. Once she even got me when I was stoned, and a couple of times after I’d had too much to drink. I didn’t care. Until winter came.
“I hadn’t been doing much after the summer. A few industrials here in town, some voice-over stuff. Good money, but just straight song and dance, flat narration, and no reviews. So the beginning of December Harv Piersall calls me to try out for Ahab. The musical that closed in previews? He wanted me to read for Starbuck, a scene where Starbuck is planning to shoot Ahab to save the Pequod. It was a good scene, a strong scene, and I got up there and I couldn’t do a thing with it. Not a goddamned thing. I was utterly flat, just like in my narration and my singing around a Pontiac. But there it hadn’t mattered—I hadn’t had to put out any emotion—just sell the product, that was all. But now, when I had to feel something, had to express something, I couldn’t. Harv asked me if anything was wrong, and I babbled some excuse about not feeling well, and when he invited me to come back and read again I did, a day later, and it was the same.
“That weekend I went down to St. Mark’s to see Sheila in an OOB production—it was a new translation of Medea by some grad student at NYU—and she’d gotten the title role. They’d been rehearsing off and on for a month, no pay to speak of, but she was enthusiastic about it. It was the largest and most important part she’d done. Papp was there that night, someone got Prince to come too. The translation was garbage. No set, tunics for costumes, nothing lighting. But Sheila . . .”
He finished his latest drink, spat the ice back into the glass. “She was . . . superb. Every emotion was real. They should have been. She’d taken them from me.
“Don’t look at me like that. I thought what you’re thinking too, at first. That I was paranoid, jealous of her talents. But once I started to think things through, I knew it was the only answer.
“She was so loving to me afterward, smiled at me and held my arm and introduced me to her friends, and I felt as dull and lifeless as that poet I’d seen her with. Even then I suspected what she’d done, but I didn’t say anything to her about it. That next week when I tried to get in touch with the poet, I found out he’d left the city, gone home to wherever it was he’d come from. I went over to Lincoln Center, to their videotape collection, and watched King Lear. I wanted to see if I could find anything that didn’t jell, that wasn’t quite right. Hell, I didn’t know what I was looking for, just that I’d know when I saw it.”
He shook his head. “It was . . . incredible. On the tape there was no sign of the performance I’d seen her give. Instead I saw a flat, lifeless, amateurish performance, dreadfully bad in contrast to the others. I couldn’t believe it, watched it again. The same thing. Then I knew why she never auditioned for commercials, or for film. It didn’t . . . show up on camera. She could fool people, but not a camera.
“I went back to the apartment then, and told her what I’d found out. It wasn’t guessing on my part, not a theory, because I knew by then. You see, I knew.”
Taylor stopped talking and looked down into his empty glass. I thought perhaps
I’d made a huge mistake in going to the bar with him, for he was most certainly paranoid, and could conceivably become violent as well, in spite of his assurances to the contrary. “So what . . .” My “so” came out too much like “sho,” but I pushed on with my question while he flagged the waiter, who raised an eyebrow, but brought more drinks. “So what did she say? When you told her?”
“She . . . verified it. Told me that I was right. ‘In a way,’ she said. In a way.”
“Well . . .” I shook my head to clear it. “. . . didn’t she probably mean that she was just studying you? That’s hardly, hardly stealing your emotions, is it?”
“No. She stole them.”
“That’s silly. That’s still silly. You’ve still got them.”
“No. I wanted . . . when I knew for sure, I wanted to kill her. The way she smiled at me, as though I were powerless to take anything back, as though she had planned it all from the moment we met—that made me want to kill her.” He turned his empty eyes on me. “But I didn’t. Couldn’t. I couldn’t get angry enough.”
He sighed. “She moved out. That didn’t bother me. I was glad. As glad as I could feel after what she’d done. I don’t know how she did it. I think it was something she learned, or learned she had. I don’t know whether I’ll ever get them back or not, either. Oh, not from her. Never from her. But on my own. Build them up inside me somehow. The emotions. The feelings. Maybe someday.”
He reached across the table and touched my hand, his fingers surprisingly warm. “So much I don’t know. But one thing I do. She’ll do it again, find someone else, you if you let her. I saw how you were looking at her today.” I pulled my hand away from his, bumping my drink. He grabbed it before it spilled, set it upright. “Don’t,” he cautioned. “Don’t have anything to do with her.”
“It’s absurd,” I said, half stuttering. “Ridiculous. You still . . . show emotions.”
“Maybe. Maybe a few. But they’re only outward signs. Inside it’s hollow.” His head went to one side. “You don’t believe me.”
“N—no . . .” And I didn’t, not then.
“You should have known me before.”
Suddenly I remembered Kevin at the audition, and his telling me how funny and wild Guy Taylor had gotten on a few drinks. My own churning stomach reminded me of how many we had had sitting here for less than an hour, and my churning mind showed me Sheila Remarque’s drunk, drunk, perfectly drunk Blanche DuBois earlier that afternoon. “You’ve had . . .” I babbled, “. . . how many drinks have you had?”
He shrugged.
“But . . . you’re not . . . showing any signs . . .”
“Yes. That’s right,” he said in a clear, steady, sober voice. “That’s right.”
He crossed his forearms on the table, lowered his head onto them, and wept. The sobs were loud, prolonged, shaking his whole body.
He wept.
“There!” I cried, staggering to my feet. “There, see? See? You’re crying, you’re crying! See?”
He raised his head and looked at me, still weeping, still weeping, with not one tear to be seen.
When the call came offering me Mitch, I took the part. I didn’t even consider turning it down. Sheila Remarque had, as Kevin, Guy Taylor, and I had anticipated, been cast as Blanche DuBois, and she smiled warmly at me when I entered the studio for the first reading, as though she remembered our audition with fondness. I was pleasant, but somewhat aloof at first, not wanting the others to see, to suspect what I was going to do.
I thought it might be difficult to get her alone, but it wasn’t. She had already chosen me, I could tell, watching me through the readings, coming up to me and chatting at the breaks. By the end of the day she’d learned where I lived, that I was single, unattached, and straight, and that I’d been bucking for eight years to get a part this good. She told me that she lived only a block away from my building (a lie, I later found out), and, after the rehearsal, suggested we take a cab together and split the expense. I agreed, and the cab left us out on West 72nd next to the park.
It was dark and cold, and I saw her shiver under her down-filled jacket. I shivered too, for we were alone at last, somewhat hidden by the trees, and there were no passersby to be seen, only the taxis and buses and cars hurtling past.
I turned to her, the smile gone from my face. “I know what you’ve done,” I said. “I talked to Guy Taylor. He told me all about it. And warned me.”
Her face didn’t change. She just hung on to that soft half smile of hers, and watched me with those liquid eyes.
“He said . . . you’d be after me. He told me not to take the part. But I had to. I had to know if it’s true, all he said.”
Her smile faded, she looked down at the dirty, ice-covered sidewalk, and nodded, creases of sadness at the corners of her eyes. I reached out and did what I had planned, said what I had wanted to say to her ever since leaving Guy Taylor crying without tears at the table in Charlie’s.
“Teach me,” I said, taking her hand as gently as I knew how. “I’d be no threat to you, no competition for roles. In fact, you may need me, need a man who can equal you on stage. Because there aren’t any now. You can take what you want from me as long as you can teach me how to get it back again.
“Please. Teach me.”
When she looked up at me, her face was wet with tears. I kissed them away, neither knowing nor caring whose they were.
ROBERT WESTALL
The Last Day of Miss Dorinda Molyneaux
ROBERT WESTALL is one of the most acclaimed contemporary writers of children’s fiction and has twice been awarded the Carnegie Medal for his novels. He was born in Tynemouth, Northumberland, and reveals: “I was blessed with a dead grandfather who glared down on my early years from his photograph on the wall; my mother’s greatest desire was that we had known each other . . . One day I found what I thought was a little stone marble in a drawer, and began to play with it. Until my aunt told me it was the gallstone that killed him. With such a start, I suppose I was doomed to write ghost stories . . .”
His idol is M.R. James (“. . . for the economy of his effects—he can get more horror out of an old blanket than Stephen King can get out of a whole town”), and the following story owes much to that classic writer’s mastery of subtle chills.
Westall’s books include Break of Dark, which is about a haunted bomber over Berlin; The Haunting of Chas McGill featuring cats versus an unmentionable horror; Ghosts and Journeys boasting a haunted toilet (“when you gotta go, you gotta go”); Rachel and the Angel which has a lost angel as dangerous as an atomic missile off course, and The Call and Other Stories involving the telephone Samaritans. “I try to get away from haunted mansions when I can,” he remarks.
LIFE’S IRONICAL; BUT SOMETIMES nice-ironical. Take the time I was struggling with all my might and main to overtake Clocky Watson in the antique trade. As you know, I failed. What I never noticed, in the middle of my exertions, was that I was becoming a very solid, prosperous citizen in the eyes of my fellow-citizens.
Not, that is, until people began having a quiet word with me, putting in a quiet word for me, ringing me up and conducting rambling, ambiguous, awkward conversations that always ended up with me being invited to join something.
The Freemasons I refused; if I have one belief, it’s that I must make my own way by my own bloody efforts, and my sense of humour would never let me appear in a funny little apron. The invitation to be a magistrate I put off for years; in my game the line between crook and Honest John is drawn in some very funny places (as it is in most games, if the truth be known) and I would not play the hypocrite. But I joined Rotary without a qualm, though I never did much apart from eat, drink and gossip. My starring moment always came in their annual sale of second-hand goods in aid of the hospital radio. I think at first they hoped I’d find a long-lost Rembrandt. But in the end they put me in charge of the old lawn-mowers, in the rain outside. (It always seemed to be raining.) And if I got the odd sideboard as a barg
ain, or a set of good Victorian chairs, I always paid more than the price they’d put on them, in their ignorance. Of course, they reckoned they were making my fortune . . .
But the invitation I liked best was to be a school manager at Barton Road Primary. I was still unmarried at thirty-four—though not from lack of wining and dining young women—and having despaired of ever having children, the chance to acquire three hundred at one blow was too great a temptation.
The third meeting I attended was to appoint a new teacher. I found it amusingly boring at first. My fellow-managers were not a brilliant lot, being mainly the weaker hangers-on of the local political parties. Each seemed to have a set question which he asked every candidate in turn, with an air of profound wisdom. We interviewed three worthy female mice, in tweed skirts and jumpers, and the only difference I could make between them was that one was rather tall, one rather fat, and one amazingly minute.
The fourth candidate was Miss Dorinda Molyneaux. That caused a stir, I can tell you. The Molyneaux were a county family, living five miles away at Barlborough Hall. There were five daughters, born one a year over twenty years before, while their mother was getting breeding over with so that she could return with undivided interest to riding horses, all duty done. The girls had a name for being spirited. One had run off to South Africa with a Count Clichy, who had once tried to run our local country club. Another went far left, emigrated to America and got involved in the Berkeley campus troubles. I looked forward with interest to what eccentricity the eldest, Miss Dorinda (or rather, to be correct, Miss Molyneaux), should display.
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