To Katy, that sounded like the perfect description of Juliet Marsh. Not that she believed Juliet to be in the dumb-blonde category—she knew she was a clever person—but value-wise, there was a chasm that Juliet didn’t even try to traverse. She was a “feel good” person, crafty, talented, and devoted to her career, if not her craft.
“Why in hell do you keep doing it, then?”
Harry looked at her oddly. “Sorry if I pushed your buttons. I was just telling you the way I see it.”
“Great! Glad to know your perceptions.” She stood and said, “I gotta go. Drive me to my car.”
FOUR
W hen he got home that evening, Harry broke his key in the front door lock and had to get in through the side door. He punched his voice-mail too hard—there was one red light blinking—and it failed to re-wind, causing him to growl at the dumb machine, methodically lay his forefinger on it and push deliberately, yet with controlled fury, to retrieve his message, which turned out to be a stupid ad for a real-estate loan.
Too much detail, he thought. I insulted Katy, expected her to give me advice on my sexual issues with Juliet. How dumb! How insensitive of me. I’ll have to make it up to her.
When he awoke in the morning, after a night of sporadic sleep—waking at least four times and having trouble dozing off again—he came to some decisions and set out to bring them to fruition.
First, he called a locksmith and made an appointment for noon or thereabouts—trades-people rarely committed to an exact time. During the morning hours, he needed to track down what he intended to proffer Katy to make things right. As for Juliet, he called and left a message, annoyed that at nine AM she wasn’t at home, the annoyance burgeoning into suspicion, suspicion into anger.
He made four calls in his tracking efforts, finally hit a jackpot of sorts, and set off in his car to pursue his Katy-offering, arriving home just before noon, hardly concerned about the closeness to the appointment time, and as it turned out, rightfully so; the key-man arrived at twelve-thirty, without apology or explanation, took three minutes to remove the broken key, and three more to repair to his truck to cut a new key. Sixty bucks for the total of fifteen minutes of the man’s time. Ah well, he is a skilled artisan, Harry thought, and I certainly can’t do what he does.
He called Katy and she answered on the third ring, cheerily, with a “Good afternoon.”
“Katy, it’s me. I’m sorry.”
“Sorry?”
“For last night.”
“What do you think happened last night?”
“I was insensitive. I overstepped our friendship. Should have known better.”
She waited, but he stopped, and she said, “So?”
“I mean it was the wrong stuff to lay on you. Not something to go public with.” He hesitated, and said, “I have something for you. Got to pick it up at four. Will you be home about five?”
“I can be.”
“I’ll be there.”
“All right.”
“I’m sorry.”
He appeared at her door with a heavy bundle that had a wire handle sticking out on top, which he held on to firmly, with a concerted effort to keep it from rocking to and fro.
“What’s in your package, a pot for boiling potatoes?”
“Hardly.” He set his package on her kitchen table and said. “It’s for you. And again, I’m sorry for my dumb behavior last night.”
She reached down and lifted the plastic cover that draped over the parcel like a tent. When it was finally removed, she gasped. “Oh, Harry, it’s a parrot! An African Grey!”
“Yep.”
“But, they’re so expensive.”
“This one is special. Anyway, I’m making a good salary—at least for the next couple of months.”
“It probably cost your salary for the run of the play. Oh, I don’t mean to be unappreciative. Thank you, thank you.” She hesitated, then asked, “Does it have a name?”
“This one’s a male, so I thought you should give it a female name. Maybe Ophelia, or something like that, since her misfortune turned out to be your fortune.”
Katy thought for a moment, then laughed aloud and said, “I know. I’m going to name it after you. Only I’ll call him ‘Harriet.’”
“Okay! Harriet is a great name.” He turned to the bird and said, “Hi there, Harriet, old bird, meet your new mom.”
There was a beat and the bird said, rather indistinctly at first, then more clearly, “Harriet. Harriet.”
Both humans, currently in the role of lizards in their Albee play, burst out with laughter at this clever animal’s verbal dexterity.
“Smart as Gus,” Katy said. “I can already see that.”
John Carmona did something neither Harry nor Katy had experienced at any of their other venues. On opening night, he called a meeting of the entire ensemble, called it a ‘pep rally,’ and took fifteen minutes to solidify a sense of community among his entourage.
“Lovely people,” he began, “you are a superb cast of actors and team members. I am excited to be working with you. I predict a booming success for this project.
“I want to say a word about the play itself. From a playwright who is considered avant-garde in any case, this is likely Albee’s most creative venture. The mix of animal and human motivations gives the viewer a glimpse into the meaning of life.
“It has been said if you want to get the public’s attention, write about gods, guns, or gays, surely more compelling than striped toothpaste or pink lemonade. Our author came up with his own version of outrageous characters and it won him a Pulitzer. Our task, yours and mine, is to make those extravagant characters believable to our audiences, normalize them without removing their astonishing uniqueness. Albee had that capacity, to make his people, no matter how eccentric, appealing to viewers, as if one might run into them at the supermarket or sit beside them on a train or plane.”
Harry smiled at the thought of sitting beside an appealing lizard anywhere in his neighborhood.
“In all, we are doing a piece of theater written by a genius; we must be ingenious in our interpretation.
“Does anyone have any kind of problem? Any issue you want to tell us about?” He waited a long moment while no one stirred, though he was well aware that just about everyone was beaming, a marvelous sign, he decided.
“Okay, so that is your challenge. Now let’s get it done!”
Harry and Katy looked at each other, her eyebrows high, his lips pursed. Something passed between them, vague and comforting, a lovely intimacy when between lovers who know in their hearts what that something is, but, for them an unverifiable presumption. His look: “This guy is old school, inspirational, intent on priming us to do rich work.” Her look: “He’s putting us on, as if we were kids needing motivation, ignoring our professional standing.”
A moment later, she said to Harry, “We have to forget the pep-talk. Emotion will give us butterflies. We know our jobs. We have to focus, clearly and coolly, on the subtleties of our parts.”
Now, he looked at her differently, respectfully, realizing the depth of his friend’s insights.
At intermission, Louis said to Miriam, “I don’t know about you, but I think our boy is pulling it off. Best work I’ve seen him do. Ought we to tell him?”
“We can, but with any reservations we may have as well. He’s not a student anymore, so I doubt it will go to his head.”
Louis pondered the thought for a moment, then switched direction, as if he’d finished with that angle: “The girlfriend, the female lizard, Harry’s friend…you know what? She’s superb. Full of nuance, comfortable on stage, believable.”
“I agree. Nice to see a young actor with such savoir faire.” Then she changed course as well and said, “What was the name of the woman we had breakfast with, the one who’d been involved with Galen Thurston?”
“Juliet something.”
“Oh yes. That’s right. Marsh, I think it was. I saw her name advertised in a film this past w
eek. I wonder if Harry is still close with her.”
“She was a pretty thing.”
“This one has a different kind of beauty. I can tell. She has heart. Not sure Juliet did, though I think she had captured our Harry’s heart.” Again she paused, and said, “I hope he sees things clearly.”
“What’s to see? He’s young. He has choices to make. Most kids make bad ones at first. Look at me. My poor choice has stayed with me for almost thirty years.”
“Idiot!”
Next day, on the Calendar page of the Times, the headline read: “Lizards Crawl Into Our Hearts.” The text pointed out that under John Carmona’s tight hand, Albee’s unconventional play, “…found a steady voice, made credible and entertaining by a fine cast, enhanced by two capable young actors playing the animal roles.” The review ended by encouraging the reading audience, “…not to miss this one.”
When British playwright, Harold Pinter, received the Nobel Prize for literature, in his acceptance speech he cited something he wrote way back in 1958:
“Truth in drama is forever elusive. You never quite find it but the search for it is compulsive. The search is clearly what drives the endeavor. The search is your task. More often than not you stumble upon the truth in the dark, colliding with it or just glimpsing an image or a shape, which seems to correspond to the truth, often without realizing that you have done so. But the real truth is that there never is any such thing as one truth to be found in dramatic art. There are many. These truths challenge each other, recoil from each other, reflect each other, ignore each other, tease each other, are blind to each other. Sometimes you feel you have the truth of a moment in your hand, then it slips through your fingers and is lost.”
Edward Albee described his own work as: “…an examination of the American scene, an attack on the substitution of artificial for real values in our society, a condemnation of complacency, cruelty, and emasculation and vacuity, a stand against the fiction that everything in this slipping land of ours is peachy-keen.”
Both award-winning playwrights are on the same page with respect to the writer’s principal purpose.
At the cast party celebrating a successful opening, Carmona cited these two eminent dramatists, and added his own opinions: “People, we have entered a combat zone. Theater does not operate in a vacuum. We have a task, which is to comment incisively on our cultural scene. We take the author’s words and ideas, sometimes we mangle them, hopefully we interpret them with panache. In the present instance, I believe we have done the writer proud. If Mr. Albee were here now, I think he would say, ‘Bravo!’ to all of us.
“I might add that other creative folks have written with the same theme. August Wilson, with his African-American focus, is one. David Mamet, while rather talky and abstruse, is another. This seems to be a universal motif in modern theater: speak with veracity, in a voice that will not settle for deceit, however pervasive in the culture.
“We are,” he added by way of closure, “pioneers on the frontier of challenging the status quo, especially when that status quo is malevolent, oppressive, corrupt, cruel, nasty, or any number of other negatives. Congratulations, people, on your incipient success as change-agents!” Harry was deeply disappointed, once again, that Juliet was not there to share in his, and their mutual friend’s, good work. Her own career had taken her to a shoot in Thailand, an action film that would likely make her a star. She was playing opposite mega-hero Harrison Ford, the film a vehicle for his typical macho exploits, a mountain of funds set aside for promotion, its monetary success a virtual guarantee.
Harry’s parents were mildly complimentary, which excited him, though he caught some reservation in his mother’s manner, her usual attitude of ‘you could have done better.’ They added that the young woman deserved accolades, praise which was said with more verve than they expressed about his performance. When Katy appeared after the post-production cleanup, they told her this to her face, which curiously pleased Harry more than if they had been effusive about him.
He had a deeply protective feeling about Katy, caring that transcended occasional disagreements and annoyance. His comfort around her was steady and gratifying, and it remained the mystery of their connection that he could not, would not, or was not aware enough to, move that comfort to anything more intimate.
FIVE
H arold Pinter also wrote: “When we look into a mirror we think the image that confronts us is accurate. But move a millimetre and the image changes. We are actually looking at a never-ending range of reflections. But sometimes a writer has to smash the mirror—for it is on the other side of the mirror that the truth stares at us.”
Pinter’s demand for truth, while aimed at theater and the creative forces that surround it, also applied to life beyond the stage. Katy knew that, Harry was beginning to know it, Juliet had her own definition of it.
There was pain in truth, Harry acknowledged, a searing and often bewildering pain, which, in his case, picked at him at a level he did not comprehend. Some day, he vaguely realized, he would have to face his own truth, deal with the pain that burdened his heart. He never forgot, though also never quite understood, a college friend—a Latino fellow-student named Julio Galan—saying to him, “The cure for the pain is in the pain.”
When would he be ready for the action phase of that truth? How could someone, young and attractive, in the fabled prime of life, on an upward spiral, in a merciless profession that scuttled many dreams, surrounded by friends and colleagues, admired, appreciated, thought to have talent and intelligence—how could this someone also suffer from a sense of utter loneliness? He needed to make sense of that phenomenon, to latch on to the causes and the antidotes for his sense of despair.
Self-deception was the hardest offense to understand.
No question, Juliet’s fading loyalty and inconstant devotion was at the root of his malaise.
Along with a slippery hope that he might still work things out with Juliet, Harry was coming face-to-face with his ambition—the adolescent goals set by his parents, his own adoption of them without examination, and his present sense that he wasn’t at all certain he wanted the fame and fortune implicit in his parents’ steady pressure, or what Sydnee Villapane had said she would deliver for a price.
Five performances into the run Juliet had not yet seen the show, and she was due back into Los Angeles the next weekend. In keeping with her new status, she had decided to change her living situation, putting a bid in on a townhouse in Santa Monica. It was a costly endeavor, but her prospects were good, and the realtor had seen her perform and was able to convince a lender to finance the purchase.
For Harry, it was one more distancing maneuver, perhaps not its purpose, but certainly its effect. He felt beneath her financially, below her professionally, and apart from her emotionally. All that, combined, stirred him to his action phase. Juliet first, his parents later.
“How about if I help you move? Anyway, I want to talk to you about some things.”
“Thanks, but my agent has connections with a mover, and I’ve already engaged him to start on Monday. What do you want to talk about?”
“Us.”
There was a beat over the phone—a conspicuous silence, a shrinking back, as Harry sensed it—followed by, “Okay. I guess it’s time. Come over this afternoon—you don’t have a matinee, do you?”
“Not today. I’ll be there at two.”
It was a slow process on the freeway, even on a Saturday afternoon, and during the long crawl to Juliet’s exit, he sat and stewed over what he ought to say, the fumes of hundreds of surging autos, and the constant red of brake-lights in front, adding to his ill humor. Disdain came over him for his life style—that he tolerated such a farcical way to live—and for the other drivers, bovine-like in their own dull acceptance of the tons of idling engines, as the long cue of traffic inched along.
When he entered her partially empty flat—her agent-pal had a large SUV and had already begun the process of loading and transpor
ting the smaller items-—she greeted him with a kiss on the mouth, her look friendly, no hint of friction, not the slightest evidence that she wanted to close him out.
“You look good. The role must agree with you.”
“When can you catch it?”
“Well, tonight is bad, since I have to organize my personal things. You have a matinee on Sunday? Maybe I can come by for that.”
It sounded condescending, her new elevated position as a known Hollywood figure creating a perceived arrogance, as Harry saw it.
He wanted to say, “Don’t do me any favors,” but instead he replied, “I’d like that. You’ll enjoy the play. It’s meaningful. Lot’s of symbolism.”
“Do you enjoy the rest of the cast and the director?”
“It’s a small cast, only four of us, and yeah, the director is amazing. John Carmona, you probably heard his name.”
“Sure. He’s been around a long time. Has a rep for being inventive and philosophical when it comes to theater.”
“That he is. Another way to say it is, inspirational. He stirs us up.”
“That’s good.”
“How was Thailand? You didn’t get sick?”
“It’s not like Mexico. You have to be careful of mosquitoes.”
Like that, the conversation—exploratory, wary, parrying and feinting in a fencing match, or the prelims for the main attraction—then a silence, awkward and heavy, both aware of a more solemn agenda to follow.
“So, what do you want to say about us?” Juliet asked.
“Ask. I want to ask.”
“What?”
“Is there an ‘us’? Is it working between us?”
“Nothing,” she said, “has changed for me. I like you. Every now and then we have glorious sex. What more needs to work?”
“Juliet, that description, what you just said, that’s what’s wrong! That kind of periodic sex, without anything deep attached to it—it eats at me, messes with my head.”
“Same old story, Harry. You either treasure what you have or you beat up on it and make it go away. Which do you want?”
Famous Page 15
