Every Night's a Bullfight

by John Gardner

  On entering his apartment, her first reaction was that he had not really put any personality stamp on it. There was an expensive stereo complex in the long bookcase which took up one wall of the main room, a stack of discs, but few books, and they, she could not help noticing, were mainly works on Shakespeare, voice control, acting. He slipped a disc on to the turntable, inevitably one of his own, a soft, string and skins backed smoochy album which she also possessed: Joe Thomas In The Quiet Hours.

  Carol slowly became conscious of the man’s dedication. The short conversation on the way back from the rehearsal hall had been totally concerned with the problems of acting and staging Shakespeare; true, they were mainly his problems, but this was very professional talk, a long way from their small clash on racialism. Here, in this very ordinary room, she found herself warming to him. He was quiet, considerate, the things one did not associate with the person whom she had always admired as a performer yet hated in the image he projected off stage.

  An hour passed without Carol realizing, relaxed as she was in the leather armchair with Joe Thomas sitting crosslegged in the middle of the room.

  At a break in the conversation she stretched out her arms and looked at her watch. ‘Is that the time? I must go.’

  ‘Ah, not yet, baby. The night’s young.’

  Reality flooded back; the relaxation had gone too far, she even felt the first tweaks of sensual desire, and she knew her own body, the threshold of her resistance like the lines of her palms: too well, too graphically.

  She gave Thomas a smile. ‘You don’t want me around. You’ll be having company before long.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘Sylvia.’ She pursed her lips.

  ‘She drops in from time to time, sure. Not tonight, though, Sylvia’s gone out with Lonnie.’

  There was a long silence between them. Then she spoke.

  ‘I don’t lay it around, Joe.’

  He looked puzzled. ‘Who said you did? I only wanted to talk...You think I asked you back for that? Oh no lady. I like a good time, sure, I play the chicks. But I have respect.’

  He seemed too open, too honest, that Carol was taken aback, so much that she even felt ashamed at having thought so basically.

  Joe Thomas became moody, as though the insult that she had inflicted on him had really hurt. Maybe it did, she reflected. She knew how you could so easily build a false picture of yourself deep within your own mind, and be badly injured when someone smashed it up with the truth. But her reaction was exactly that which Joe had prayed for, she began to overcompensate, going to sit on the floor, touching his arm, flattering.

  Within half-an-hour she knew where it was going to end and she did not care anymore: to bother would have been laughably dramatic. Carol Evans wanted a man and this man was notorious. In a strange way they were both scalp hunting as they began the first stray movements towards sexual pleasure. The opening gambits progressed towards the kiss; delicate, gentle, but with a sharp sense of novelty; the new experience, the old gathe with a new body, the new words whispered with different intonations, the old moves with different expression. Both of them reacted slowly, though there soon came a point when the bodily urgency was more demanding: Joe’s tongue fencing and her own probing as though mapping out his mouth, examining his response.

  His cool had to be admired; at the moment of no return he disengaged from her, rolled away, and then rose to take off his clothes, a chore which he effected in a careful series of movements, as though it was some ritual always observed. Carol only wore ankle socks and pants under her jeans and turtleneck and she was out of them before Joe Thomas was completely undressed. She looked up at him with genuine admiration. ‘Hey, you look great stripped.’

  He grinned, slipping out of his pants and revealing himself. ‘Spread it around, kid, spread it around.’

  He was on the floor beside her and the dance began in earnest; the soft hand movements, skin and skin and hair and hair, the blood pumping, a shiver of pleasure as they touched one another, the increasing mount to the moment when Carol was breathing, ‘Come in...Come into me, Joe...’ The pleasurable pain of assault, of being opened and filled in a different way, by a body unknown.

  She came very quickly the first time, though later it was a long and mutually enjoyable ride.

  Dressed again and ready to leave with the throb of him still on her and his smell clinging to her own sweat, she put up her face to be kissed.

  ‘Am I still an Uncle Tom?’

  He put his head on one side. ‘In some ways. You screw like a good black girl though, I will not deny. We must try it again some time.’

  The remark, made so casually, stung, making her feel like a whore. It was several days before she could get the feeling out of her system. When she finally did, Carol was able to rationalize her emotions, seeing with clarity what had happened. She had behaved in the same way many times before, but always on her own terms. Because Joe Thomas had insinuated himself upon her, because she had enjoyed the experience and because, in the end, he had insulted her, she now felt guilt, and that was merely over-dramatized self-indulgence.

  In rehearsal she found herself watching Douglas Silver again with the same feelings of need, almost an anguish that had in no way been assuaged by Joe Thomas’s body. It was like being on some roundabout and the uneasiness soon returned.

  By this time Douglas Silver really only noticed Carol as an actress, just as he saw his wife in the same way, so tied up was he with the plays and their direction.

  He was working with instinctive brilliance now, knowing exactly where the productions lagged or needed shoring up, resetting (like the arrival at Cyprus in Othello, which he changed twice before getting the grouping and movement exactly right).

  Joe Thomas responded well to the encouragement which Douglas gave him, and nobody could deny that, what had been a rocky start, was now developing into a performance of outstanding promise. At the same time they were conscious, as all actors are, of the fact that, with the live arts, you cannot be certain of anything until the essential ingredient, an audience, was added: even then there was to be a spark, the leap and flash between actors and audience, to set the night alive. Douglas worked ceaselessly towards creating all the right conditions, his mind working with a dazzling speed and the energy pumping out as though he had some constant, unquenchable, source of vitality.

  He was so involved, filled with the techniques of his company, crammed with clarified ideas, seeing the productions step by step and in sharp focus, that, on an evening at the end of February, he did not at first understand Jennifer’s attitude when he returned to the apartment after a strenuous and rewarding Merchant rehearsal.

  Jennifer had allowed her knowledge of Carol and Douglas to fester. On four occasions she went into Merchant rehearsals simply to observe Carol Evans and the girl’s attitude towards Douglas. She saw what any woman in the same position would have seen: a girl constantly wrapped up in her director, hardly taking her eyes off him when he spoke, and, during the scenes when she was off, sitting, bunched up, usually on the stage floor, arms clasped round her knees, concentrating on Douglas as though he was the answer to all things in life.

  Though she was deep inside Desdemona, and the Othello rehearsals were tiring, Jennifer had time to brood, her imagination snaking into swamps of mistrust, seeing new mental shapes and pictures, especially when Douglas was tied up, working, during the evenings. The jealous bud grew and flowered, seeped and wept until she could hold it no longer. In the moments of sanity and calm reason, she knew it would be wrong to bring the matter into the open again, not just wrong, but foolish and overemphatic.

  They had moved Othello into the theatre, the refurbishing work having been completed, and Douglas was allowing members of the company, not in the Othello cast, to sit in at rehearsals (it had been one of the suggestions made during a company meeting). That morning, Joe and Jennifer had been through the difficult fourth scene in Act Three, with all the intrica
te business of the ‘strawberry spotted’ handkerchief, and Joe was, for some reason, not co-ordinating his moves as well as he should be. About eleven they broke for tea, Joe slinking away to sit alone in the Prompt Corner. Jennifer was concerned about him, and, after a couple of minutes with Douglas, she went over and sank down beside Thomas.

  ‘You okay, Joe?’

  ‘I’m not moving right.’ Sullen.

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘Out there’s what’s wrong,’ he inclined his head towards the auditorium. Jennifer followed his movement, there was a small group of company members sitting far back, almost out of sight, among them she picked out Carol Evans.

  ‘What’s wrong out there?’ asked Jennifer, more interested now, knowing that the Evans girl was here to watch her husband at work.

  ‘My little black sister.’ He turned towards her speaking quietly. ‘Jen, I’m a bastard, you know that, but I get bugged easily. Once with that Carol Evans, once only and she’s following me around like Mary’s lamb.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘She’s been sitting in at rehearsals for the last three days and it’s starting to bug me. I don’t like being followed around; girls like her give it one time and then expect a whole scene, the roses and organ music.’

  ‘You had an affair with her?’

  Joe Thomas laughed. ‘No, Jen, baby, I had one night, not even a night. One evening we talked a lot and in the end she took her pants down. Now I find her sitting in at all my rehearsals; she’s even around when I go to eat.’

  It was nonsense of course, but Joe had been building up to one of his ego-inflated crises over the past few days.

  ‘She’s got a thing about you?’ Jennifer asked.

  ‘I don’t know. I haven’t talked with her since then. She’s a nice kid, but I got other things to do. I work hard and play hard. Sure I had her, but that don’t make her own me.’

  In her mind, Jennifer seized the weapon and clung to it with joy. It did not matter that Joe Thomas’s conclusions were completely wrong, that Carol Evans was around at Othello rehearsals because that was where she could watch Douglas, not because of the big entertainer whom they were all licking into shape and who, beneath the easy exterior, was a complex mass of anxiety and worries.

  So, that evening, after Douglas had guided Maurice Kapstein through three long sequences, she dragged it all into the open again.

  It had become Douglas’s custom to come in sometime between six and seven and pour drinks for them before they ate their evening meal. Tonight he went through the usual ritual, calling to Jennifer that he was home, tossing his notebooks and clip board on to his favourite chair, and crossing the room to slurp Bacardi into a pair of tumblers while Jennifer came in with the big coke bottle from the fridge.

  It was not until they were both seated and Douglas had taken his first sip that Jennifer began.

  ‘While I was away?’ It was obviously the start of some interrogation, though Douglas, his mind on the problem of having put too much background business into the Trial scene, did not even catch the sentence as a question.

  ‘Where?’ he asked vaguely.

  ‘While I was away making Hidalgo?’

  ‘Jen, love, what’s up? Are you asking or telling me something?’

  ‘I’m doing both.’

  ‘Well?’ He put his drink on to the side table and gave up his concentration to her.

  ‘While I was away doing Hidalgo, you had an affair.’

  His brow crumpled, the familiar relief map of concern. ‘Not again, Jen, please. It’s all over. Things have settled back into place.’

  ‘Have they? That’s interesting Douglas, because I’m not so certain. You had an affair with Carol Evans. And she’s here. With the company.’

  Douglas’s initial reaction was of irritation: a large ‘damn’ in his head; no anxiety, that was reserved for the four productions, for his actors, for people like Joe Thomas, Kapstein, Catellier, Liz Column, Jen, Carol even.

  ‘Forget it,’ he said sharply.

  ‘Forget it?’ Almost a shout, bitterness bubbling up from the well of what had passed. ‘You ask me to forget it. I come back and find that you’ve been having an involved, passionate, that’s the word isn’t it, passionate, attachment with somebody. You tell me that it’s all over, and then I find out that the somebody’s here, a member of the company, and you ask me to forget it: when she’s still hanging round your neck?’

  ‘She’s not—’

  ‘She’s sitting in at the Othello rehearsals, and I’ve been in at the Merchant, she sits there like a moonstruck schoolgirl, Douglas: and you expect me to believe that it’s over, it’s over, it’s over—?’

  ‘Jennifer.’ A bark, shutting her off like somebody pulling a switch. When he spoke again the usual calm had returned. ‘Love, it is over. Yes, okay, it was Carol Evans and when we finished it I told her that she had to make a choice. She either had to come here and play Juliet, forgetting what had gone on between us, or not come at all. I was all set to have her replaced, but she came, and since she’s been here there’s been nothing but a correct professional relationship between us. That’s the truth, Jen. Now can we drop it?’

  ‘She’s a whore.’

  ‘Calling her names isn’t going to help. I can understand you being upset, but there’s too much at stake here...’

  ‘I’m not calling her names, I’m stating a fact. She’s a whore. She’s been at it with Joe Thomas.’

  It rocked him: his deep pride, the vanity that is within all men; the indescribable and intolerable arrogance which makes a man jealous, even of that which is not now his.

  ‘Does it really matter?’ he said lamely. ‘Does it make any difference? Another body, a need, a satisfaction, the quenching of fire. All good dramatic stuff. Ten years from now we could all laugh about it.’

  ‘I’ve never been able to think that way, Douglas. Perhaps it’s my stolid middle-class upbringing. I love you and I’m married to you, and I know all the things that go on and that we’re supposed to accept, but basically I’ve always believed in, and tried to live, for the two of us.’

  ‘Well believe it and live it now, Jen, because I’ve got my hands full of actors and designs and plotting, not to mention property, money and bookings and the general running of this place.

  ‘You expect me to be cool, nice and pleasant to your black whore.’

  ‘Jennifer, let it lie. I start rehearsing Richard and Romeo next week. It’s a miracle that we’ve kept to schedule so far. You’ve got enough to worry about with your work, have the sense to see that mine holds everything together, and put Carol out of your mind.’

  It was an easy thing to say, and the juice of their quarrel worked in many ways. For Jennifer there was still anger and concern, she had no desire to lose Douglas in any sense, yet it was hard for her, resenting, as she did, the presence of the girl who had given so easily when she was not there.

  At the same time, Douglas was reawakened towards the fact of Carol: the lust creeping into the back of his mind when he least needed it; whether it was true about Carol and Joe Thomas was a side issue, its outward action was that his attitude towards Thomas now underwent a subtle change: he became more pushy, less sympathetic to the man’s problems, his criticisms more astringent and his demands more pressing. In many ways it all assisted for the more Douglas pushed, the greater the reaction from Thomas, adding finer points to his performance, exploiting Douglas’s direction so that in performance the whole definition of character was being finely and dramatically revealed. Othello, the soldier statesman, lover; then the collapse into the true nature of the man, with jealousy gnawing at his entrails.

  On their first full run through, all this, and more, was apparent, and, while Douglas had been initially thrown by Jennifer’s assault and revelations, he now felt calmer about the production; happy also with Jennifer’s own performance as Desdemona, a splendid mixture of joyous innocence and mistrusting fear, making a fitting con
trast to this Othello’s plunge into the emerald waters of unreason. Crispin’s Iago was also a major contribution: sly, tricksy but with a stylish arrogance.

  As for The Merchant, Douglas, not unnaturally, felt less tension when working on it, particularly as the production had begun to move with exciting precision: elegance off-set by the rat-race of business and the all-pervading atmosphere which the whole cast was bringing to bear, as though they were really planting the seeds of corruption. At the head of it all, Maurice Kapstein had started to produce a truly real tragi-comic character from Shakespeare’s Shylock, even though he had taken to slipping in his old catch-phrase (‘Don’t trust anyone not even your own father, yet.’) on exits, or when he dried.

  In the last week of February Douglas began to step up his schedule by bringing Richard III and Romeo and Juliet into rehearsal: the scheme of the week now running with Richard rehearsals on Monday, Wednesday and Friday mornings and Othello on those afternoons; Romeo and Juliet on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday mornings and The Merchant in the afternoons. Conscious that this still did not give them enough rehearsal time, Douglas set Ronnie Gregor and Robin Alvin the task of bumping up a tighter timetable to come into use when they needed it most in a few weeks’ time.

  It was not until the Monday morning when they were about to start the Richard rehearsals that Douglas realized how much he had been dreading the play. True, he had given several hours to Conrad, during the past weeks, in order to carry on their discussion about the character of Richard, but now he had reached the starting gate, fear and depression dropped into the director’s gut. To his surprise, Catellier was more enthusiastic than he had dared hope, making a great contribution from the first moment.

  After the Monday morning company meeting, the Richard cast settled themselves and Douglas began talking, looking around himself to adjust to the particular group.

  Conrad sat on the floor with Jennifer, who would make a brief appearance as Lady Anne; Crispin was there, not as his now familiar Iago, but as Richard’s pawn, the Duke of Buckingham; Felicity Durrant, Liz Column and Rachel Cohen were grouped together (they would, respectively, be seen as the Duchess of York, Queen Margaret and Queen Elizabeth), while Douglas also took in the presence of men like Murray Fleet, now to play the Duke of Norfolk, Laurence Pern (Hastings) and Ronald Escort (The Bishop of Ely).