Seen It All and Done the Rest

by Pearl Cleage

  “This is all the work of that little Cuban floozie if you ask me.”

  François’s new girlfriend was a Cuban actress who had joined the company two years ago and was both talented and beautiful.

  “She’s not a floozie and she hasn’t got that kind of influence over the board anyway.”

  “They don’t deserve you.”

  I took another swallow of champagne to soothe my frazzled nerves. “He took great pains to tell me that they were prepared to let me keep the apartment and pay me half salary even though I wouldn’t be playing such a visible role.”

  When I said that about the apartment, Howard looked as shocked as I had felt. I’d been living there so long, I had almost forgotten it technically belonged to the theater. Apparently, François’s memory was a lot better than mine.

  “What did you tell him?”

  “I told him I wanted all of it in writing so I could show it to my lawyer.”

  “Good for you! I didn’t even know you had a lawyer.”

  “I don’t. No job. No lawyer. I’m batting a thousand.” I could never remember whether a big number or a small number was better in baseball. “Is that the bad one?”

  Howard smiled and patted my hand. “I’m not a big sports fan, sweetie. I couldn’t tell you.”

  “Well, whatever is the worst, that’s what I’m batting.”

  We just looked at each other. This was bad and we both knew it.

  “Should I act like a real American and go over there and kick his ass for him?” Howard said.

  “Would you?”

  “With pleasure. All you have to do is say the word.”

  “I’m not there yet,” I said, “but hold yourself in readiness.”

  “Can’t you teach classes or something?”

  I looked at him.

  “What? You’d be a fabulous teacher.”

  “I’m a fabulous actress, remember? I don’t have the patience to teach.”

  “Maria Callas gave private lessons.”

  Callas was Howard’s favorite opera singer of all time, but the legendary diva’s voice classes were famous for making mincemeat of those who came to worship her.

  “She made people cry and slash their wrists,” I reminded him.

  “Nobody slashed their wrists.”

  “That’s because they had to leave all sharp objects at the door.”

  “Okay, okay,” he said. “I get it. Teaching is out. So what are you going to do?”

  The truth was, the funeral had come up so quickly on the heels of my demotion that I hadn’t had time to really consider the question. It would take me a minute to process the possibilities and come up with a plan that would feed me creatively and put champagne on the table.

  “I have no idea.”

  “You still going to do your trip?”

  I was leaving for Atlanta in two days. My granddaughter had been on the periphery of a high-profile murder case that consumed Atlanta gossips for months and exposed her to a level of scrutiny and speculation for which she was unprepared. Shell-shocked, she had withdrawn from college in the middle of her senior year. Her mother was worried and so was I. Howard loved Zora almost as much as I did. Almost. He’s the one who taught her to speak French and took her to her first Paris fashion show. She’d been flying to Europe to spend part of the summer with me for almost ten years, but this year she told me she just wasn’t up for the trip.

  “Of course.”

  “Good for you,” Howard said. “Strategically, it’s absolutely the right move. Leave your outrage hanging in the air and haul ass back to Atlanta until I can sort things out here.”

  Is that what I was doing? Hauling ass? “I’ve never run from a fight in my life.”

  “This isn’t running, sweetie. This is a strategic withdrawal.”

  “What is there to sort out?”

  “Everything,” he said. “Did you not participate actively in the conceptualization and actualization of the Human Theatre Company?”

  “François had the theater when I met him. You know that. Technically, it’s his. He can do anything he wants to with it.”

  “Fuck technically. I’m talking about truth. Did you or did you not?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “Were you planning to stop performing before François’s surprising announcement?”

  “Of course not. Not yet anyway.”

  “Not yet? Not ever. Great actors are ageless, sweetie. You’re just hitting your stride.”

  “I can’t see myself doing Medea when I’m sixty.”

  “Then do Clytemnestra. Do Rose Maxson. Do Lena Younger or that three-hundred-fifty-year-old voodoo girl in August Wilson’s last opus.”

  “Second to last. There’s one more after that.”

  “You’re missing my point, sweetie. Our board used to be like us. Artists and a few rich eccentrics and, if we were lucky, somebody who owned a café close by. Now they’re a bunch of stone-faced bean counters who wouldn’t know a piece of art if it hit ’em in the face.” Howard’s voice was rising again.

  “Calm down,” I said. “We don’t need to be thrown out of anyplace else today.”

  Howard ignored my suggestion. “Just because it’s no longer me and you and François and Halima sitting up in my funky little apartment, dreaming and drinking and smoking bad dope, doesn’t mean this thing we created now belongs to them. Fuck that! Let’s fight for it!”

  “How are we supposed to do that?”

  “Who knows? For now, you go to Atlanta. Spend time with Miss Zora and help her get that lovely little head screwed on right again. Rest and play and have fun while I figure out our next move. How are your finances?”

  “I’m okay,” I said, but the question set off alarm bells in my head. I’m okay only in the sense that as long as I had my regular stipend coming in from the theater and my beautiful little rent-free apartment, I could live at the level to which I’d become accustomed and continue to follow what Jack Nicholson called the universal rule of show business: the one who’s working pays. Since I’d been working regularly for the last thirty years, I’d paid for hundreds of meals, rivers of wine, oceans of beer. I’d loaned money for rent knowing I’d never get it back, paid for round-trip tickets home on the only working credit card in the group, and been glad to do it. That was the beauty of the rule. It gave those of us in a notoriously fickle profession a way to handle emergencies without having to humble ourselves to outsiders with straight jobs who always feel obligated to lecture you on the precariousness of your financial situation, like you don’t already know it.

  The fact of the matter is, my finances are nothing to write home about. I haven’t got any savings to speak of. I own a duplex in Atlanta that my mother left me, but I have no idea what it’s worth, and I’ve got a couple of thousand bucks stashed here and there as a hedge against being a broke old lady, depending on the kindness of strangers. I always kind of figured that I’d add more to it later so I’d wind up with a bigger nest egg, but I just never got around to it. It occurred to me in a sickening flash that if I couldn’t work this out with François, I might have to start auditioning for parts again, which would be a nightmare. An audition at twenty-five is one thing. An audition at fifty-eight is something else altogether. That’s why those Hollywood girls cut their faces up and shoot them full of Botox like that. Trying to turn back time.

  “Come to Atlanta with me,” I said, feeling suddenly more vulnerable than I wanted to. “We’ll only stay a couple of months, I promise. François will come to his senses and we’ll be back by spring.”

  Howard shook his head. “I refuse to visit any country where you can’t smoke a joint with your morning cappuccino without getting hauled off to jail. It’s not civilized. Besides, I promised the ghost of Langston Hughes that if I ever got my black ass out of Chicago, they wouldn’t have to worry about Howard Denmond setting foot on American soil ever again. As long as I stay here, I’m living the life I dreamed about. Back there, I’m just one more blac
k faggot with a little style.”

  “You could never be just one more anything.”

  “Could you?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “How about one more glass of champagne.”

  “Your wish is my command.” He waved at Julian, our waiter-slash-actor, who was already hovering with a bottle of something French, which he said was on the house.

  “Why are you so good to me?” I said when Julian had poured us two glasses, made another small bow, and disappeared.

  It was a rhetorical question, but Howard answered it anyway. “Because you’re my best friend and I can’t bear to see them treat you this way. Plus, you’re a star, sweetie. You’ve opened and closed the season every year for the last decade. George Bush doesn’t cancel all that out by being the biggest fool on God’s green earth.”

  “All right. I will leave myself in your capable hands.”

  “Good! This shouldn’t take long, I promise.”

  “Do you already have a battle plan?”

  “Of course. First, I’m going to remind them of who you are. I may also let slip that you’ve had a very attractive offer from The Red Bird Workshop.”

  The Red Bird was the new kid on the block, and François was already worried about them stealing his audience. “I have?”

  Howard smiled. “Leave everything to me, sweetie.”

  “I guess at this point, I don’t have much choice.”

  He leaned over and patted my hand. “Have I ever let you down?”

  “Never.”

  “Well, I’m not about to start now.”

  “Good.”

  “I know one thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I’m going to miss you like crazy,” he said, his voice cracking just a little. “Jesus! I didn’t even cry at the damn funeral!”

  “You didn’t have time,” I said. “We got tossed out too fast.”

  Howard grimaced. “What a day! That already seems like a hundred years ago!”

  “A hundred years and counting.”

  Over the next two hours, what had started off as an angry drowning of our sorrows evolved into a wonderfully teary bon voyage party and a picture-perfect ending to an absolutely terrible day. All I needed to do now was call Zora and tell her I was on my way.

  “Well, let’s have one last toast before we drag our drunk asses home,” Howard said, dividing the last corner of the dark green bottle between us.

  “Good idea,” I said. “What are we toasting?”

  “Here’s to being real Americans.” He raised his glass and grinned across the table at me. “Who knew?”

  TWO

  The test of a decision you make when you’ve been drinking champagne is whether or not it holds up in the morning when you’re drinking coffee. To my great relief, I woke up at dawn and felt exactly as I had the night before. It was time to head for Atlanta. Zora needed some life lessons her sweet mother couldn’t teach her, and I needed distance and time to clear my head. It was a fluke that I came to Amsterdam at all. One of the women in the touring cast of Ntozake Shange’s play For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf got pregnant and couldn’t travel. I auditioned, got the part, got my passport, said goodbye to my son and his father, and hopped on a plane, heading for a twelve-city tour, all within ten frantic days.

  I was in heaven. It was a great company of actresses who all had more experience than I did. Their work was so good it made mine get better just to keep up. All the characters in the play are identified in the script only by the colors they wore: the lady in yellow, the lady in blue, the lady in green, the lady in purple. I was the lady in red. My big climactic scene at the end of the play required me to describe watching my former husband, Beau Willie, drop our two screaming children out of a tenement window while the whole neighborhood watches. I did this six times a week, including a matinee on Saturday. It was a hell of a way to spend an evening, but the truth of those black girls’ lives that we were putting on the stage rang so true every time we spoke it out loud that audiences gave us standing ovations every night. The reviews were rapturous, and everywhere we went, the ladies who made up the cast, including me, were treated like the reincarnation of Josephine Baker—times five. Berlin, even with all of its ghosts, loved us. Lisbon couldn’t get enough. Rome begged us to stay longer. London couldn’t resist us, although they tried, and Paris was a dream come true. Then we went to Amsterdam.

  The minute I stepped off the plane, I knew I was going to stay longer than the ten days we were scheduled to be here. A lot longer. I had no idea how I’d work it out with my son’s father, who was no longer my lover but continued to be a wonderful and loving presence in his son’s life, but I knew I’d have to find a way. There was just something about the place that felt like home in a way that Atlanta never had. The only time it came really close was the night Maynard Jackson got elected the city’s first black mayor, but that was one day, one spectacular event. This was something else. This was a feeling of personal freedom that I had never known before, even in New York. I felt like I had permission to follow my imagination wherever it might lead me. For the first time, there were no forces, seen or unseen, attempting to put me in one box or another because I was a woman or because I was black. Nobody in Amsterdam gave a damn.

  Howard said it was because after you come face-to-face with Hitler, you don’t sweat the small stuff. We had just been on a tour of the Anne Frank house, so Nazis were very much on his mind, but I knew what he meant. My more cynical friends said there simply weren’t enough black folks around for us to be a problem. Yet.

  “Right now, we’re still exotic to them,” Denise said one night after the show when we were having drinks and I said I could see myself living there. “You wait until we aren’t all superstars or jazz musicians and see how much they love us.”

  Denise had no patience with white folks, especially white men. Playing the lady in yellow who has the great monologue about losing her virginity in the backseat of a great big Buick, she was a vibrant, cocoa-brown butterfly with great big eyes and a manner so effortlessly flirtatious that there were always several enraptured men waiting at the stage door after every show, convinced she had been speaking only to them. She laughed at their adoration, signed their programs “all my love,” and never let them buy her so much as a glass of champagne, explaining to anyone who asked, “They bought a ticket, not a date.”

  She was convinced that white male interest in black women was always based on a racist idea of our supposed sexual promiscuity rather than on our own undeniable fabulousness. I tried to suggest that maybe we ought to give ourselves more credit than that, but she just snorted and waved her hand at the waiter for another Pernod.

  “You wait until we start taking their jobs,” she said. “That’s when they’ll show their true colors.”

  At the time, I thought she was merely a victim of outmoded American attitudes about race, but that was a long time ago. These days, race riots in Paris and terrorist plots in London make race as complicated an issue here as it is in the States. Not to mention religion. When you add the current wave of antiwar, anti-American sentiment to the mix, it becomes not only complex but exhausting. Even in the light of day, my decision to spend some time in Atlanta seemed like the best move I could make, and in life, just like in theater, timing is everything. Right now, it was time to call Zora.

  The phone rang four times before she cleared me with the caller ID and answered.

  “Mafeenie?”

  When Zora was a toddler, Mafeenie was as close as she could get to Grandma Josephine, and it had stuck. Her voice sounded sleepy, although it was early afternoon, Atlanta time.

  “Hey, darlin’! Did I wake you?”

  “No, I’m just…watching a movie.”

  I heard the tinkling of ice and, in the background, the sound of the Mayor of Munchkin City reading a proclamation to the bedazzled Dorothy.

  “Don’t you ever watch anything but The Wizard of Oz?
” I teased her, hoping she wasn’t sipping anything stronger than a Coke. Cocktails alone in the middle of the day made me nervous, especially since her mother had called a week ago to tell me she thought Zora was drinking. I could hear the terror in Jasmine’s voice. She had suffered so much with my son, Zora’s father, before he drank himself to death. I think the idea of battling the same devils in his daughter was more than Jasmine’s gentle spirit could comprehend.

  “It’s a classic,” Zora said, sounding defensive.

  “I’m just teasing,” I said gently. “How’ve you been?”

  “Okay. Where are you?”

  “I’m still in Amsterdam.”

  “Is everything okay?”

  “Everything’s fine. I just wanted to let you know I’m headed your way.”

  “To Atlanta?”

  “Don’t sound so surprised,” I said. I hadn’t been home since her father’s funeral six years ago. Since then, she had always come to see me, until last year when all that mess happened. Now I could hear the faint sound of the Munchkins singing one of their many welcome songs. Zora had slurred the T’s in Atlanta ever so slightly. If she was drinking Coke, it had rum in it.

  “You hate Atlanta.”

  “But I adore you,” I said, “so that puts me about even.”

  “What’s going on?”

  I gave her the no-worries version of my current condition. “François and I are not seeing eye to eye on some things at the theater, and until we get them straightened out, I’m on leave.”

  “From acting?”

  “Don’t sound so shocked,” I said, soothing myself as much as I was soothing her. “It’s just temporary. I’m trying to give François and the new board enough time to come to their senses and let me open the season.”

  “You always open the season.”

  “They’re mad at Americans, so they’ve decided not to let me.”

  “American actresses?”

  “Americans, period. Because of the war.”

  “They blame you?”

  “They blame us.”

  “François, too?”

  “François’s in love so he can’t be counted on to do the right thing. His new girlfriend thinks I’m too old to do Medea.”