Every Night's a Bullfight

by John Gardner

  Joe was undoing his belt as she picked up the dress. ‘Joe?’

  He stood still, comprehension on his face. ‘You’re going to put that on again, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  A small explosion of air from his mouth, perhaps a smothered oath.

  ‘Don’t get mad, Joe. I know it’s wrong of me. A girl who says no at the last minute deserves—’

  ‘All she gets, which in different circumstances would he six cracked teeth.’ He did not smile. ‘It’ll be okay, Jen, just get that goddamn dress on and move yourself out of here fast.’

  Her stomach was an open pit wherein a large coarse hand opened, closed, opened, flexed its fingers and closed again; she felt sick, the saliva running like a fountain and her eyes burned with the first threat of tears.

  Jennifer did not, later, remember putting on the dress, shoes, unlocking the door. There was a picture of the dim corridors and the darkness once outside, the grass and the people as she ran back over the lawns to the house.

  She was unlocking the door to the apartment when Douglas appeared at the far end of the passage, from the direction of Joe Thomas’s apartment: that registered. Douglas’s face bleak with rage. It was the first time she had seen him truly encompassed by such fury, reaching for her shoulder and propelling her into the apartment like a small, offending, child.

  ‘Joe Thomas,’ he clipped out as though speaking an obscenity.

  She could not put together the thought processes which had brought him to this point of hate, or jealousy, or whatever the emotion was. Jennifer could only stammer half-formed sentences.

  ‘You and Joe Thomas, tonight.’ Douglas spoke loudly, not questioning, simply a demand.

  ‘Douglas...’ Pleading.

  ‘You left the party with Joe Thomas nearly three-quarters-of-an-hour ago. You weren’t at the exhibition, or in his apartment. Where were you?’

  ‘Doug, please, why so uptight?’

  ‘And what were you doing? Why? Because a member of the company quoted Othello at me tonight. An old black ram is tupping your white ewe.’

  A sudden anger, injustice, burned in her.

  ‘A few months ago they could have misquoted that and been accurate: an old white ram is tupping your black ewe.’ She shot hard.

  ‘It’s not the colour.’

  ‘Of course it isn’t. It wouldn’t matter if she had been a puce martian.’

  ‘Right, Jen, or he candy striped and green. It’s us.’

  She gave a little smile, her lips close together. ‘How did Kipling put it, so bloody patronizingly?

  The Colonel’s lady and Judy O’Grady,

  Are sisters under their skins...

  ‘I know:

  What you can learn with the yellow and brown,

  Will help you a lot with the white.’

  In spite of herself, Jennifer began to giggle.

  ‘I don’t see...’ Douglas began.

  ‘It’s all right, darling, I promise. Nothing happened with Joe Thomas. Oh God you’re so funny when you get pompous. Just like a bloody man; I’m away and you have a great lovelorn thing and screw Carol Evans from here to whenever, and you expect me to understand and be sympathetic. Then I go missing for half-an-hour with Joe Thomas and that’s the deadly sin. I come back and you’re standing there, metaphorical whip in hand, almost telling me to bend over your desk. Really Doug, you’re the bloody end.’

  For ten seconds the silence was strained, then the atmosphere leaped on to another plane.

  ‘Oh Jesus,’ Douglas started to laugh. Jen, I’m sorry.’

  ‘You will be, love. Nothing happened tonight, but it nearly did, so you’ll have to sweat out Othello and Desdemona for the rest of the season.’

  Douglas stopped laughing, the corners of his mouth still upturned in a smile. ‘We’ll see about that. You ever had a dress torn off your back?’

  ‘Try me.’

  Joe Thomas, still whirling from the first high, a combination of promised success and alcohol, now dropped to the gloom of despair. For a couple of hours he had ridden a cloud of happiness, the culmination was the pledge of a new, and desired, body in which to cool his mounting lust. Then, without warning, that opportunity had been removed. Jennifer left and he was alone in the dressing-room.

  His loins sang, the fire in his head burned with a raging brilliance, locking out everything but the need for satisfaction, some part of a woman, preferably her basic self, around him soothing the ache. Christ he wanted Jennifer Frost, almost to the point of madness:

  ‘I do confess the vices of my blood,

  So justly to your grave ears I’ll present

  How 1 did thrive in this fair lady’s love...’

  He quoted aloud, cutting the words, conscious that he was concerned more with lust than love, as he unlocked the private cupboard above the dressing-room mirrors. Joe always kept the cupboard locked, for it contained his private stock of liquor. He took down a tumbler and jug together with an unopened bottle of Teacher’s. He ran water into the sink until it was really cold: there was no ice, but that did not matter.

  The party spun towards its climax; in another hour or so it would all be over, the drunks comatose, lovers paired, the rest to their double or single beds, to sleep or ache, dream or hope. Emilio Benneto relaxed for the first time that day. In the short period which had passed since Doris had been snuffed from his side, Mary Doul had been an almost constant companion, a prop, shoring up the imminent collapse of his being. To take his mind from the intense personal grief, she talked to him much about her own problems: born into an Army family, Mary’s father had been a regular officer with an iron hand and total reliance on the power of hard discipline, so when, at the age of eighteen, she fell deeply and unreasonably in love with a pacifist artist whose talent was outweighed by the fervour of his political and social convictions, there was the inevitable family clash. The result led to Mary romantically eloping with young Richard Doul, her father playing the heavy parent and cutting her off without the proverbial penny. Doul himself enjoyed a brief success: no doubt spurred on by his young wife’s ardour, he produced a series of abstracts which excited the imagination of several critics, giving him a certain standing; so, for around three years, the young couple were able to live in a position from which they could cock a calm snook at Mary’s outraged parents. Then, for no apparent reason, Richard Doul collapsed one morning and was dead by evening of a brain haemorrhage.

  There followed the long hell of Mary Doul. Her parents were intractable and her grief long sustained. Thrown back upon herself with the shadow of a rigid upbringing stamped deep into her personality, her thin body stacked with bitterness and resentment she lived, at first a nomadic life among temporary jobs, trekking from one bed-sitter to another: a displaced person in her own land.

  In the end the catering trade claimed her, a petty martinet of the kitchens of a dozen hotels until she arrived on the Shireston scene. It was an outdated, romantic story, but the fragments of it that she was able to impart to Emilio Benneto were a solace to the Italian. He, being a romantic, by race as well as condition, was able to appreciate her personal agonies which helped to put his own shattered work into perspective.

  The grief and shock were still, unmercifully, with him, but the presence of Mary Doul, her softening towards him, were already, in this short time, starting to compensate.

  During this difficult first day of the season she had, many times, left her own work to slip over to the theatre restaurant for a quick word and reassuring look. During the party that night she had been there, helping him. Now, they stood together, apart from the main throng.

  ‘They have enjoyed themselves, these actors, eh?’

  ‘I’ve never seen a party like it at Shireston, Emilio. You should be proud.’

  There was a long silence, augmented by the blast from the loudspeakers piping music for the dancing, and the happy babble of the crowd. Emilio’s voice broke as he said, ‘Doris would have enjoyed tonight. At th
e reception for the company she was so happy: and at Christmas.’

  ‘I know, Emilio, it’s so hard, but you’ve entered into a new phase now. You have to accept it, my dear man. It is all part of life whichever way you look at it.’

  Laurence Pern was deliriously drunk, happily drunk in a bewildered, hopeless, falling down, state. Ronald Escott and Mark Lynton carried him, screeching and helpless with inebriated mirth, over to the house and bedded him down, un-ceremonially, and still fully dressed, in his room.

  David Wills spent the evening trying to persuade Rachel Cohen to marry him. Before the first performance he sent her a dozen red roses, which he could ill afford, and since then he had taken every available step: at the party and the exhibition, which he showed off to her with the pride of a schoolboy revealing his art exhibits on an open day, in order to press an answer from her.

  A week before, Rachel had asked him for a little more time, to think; they were happy enough, she said, after all their mutual enjoyment, both physical and mental, could not be greater (‘Darling we never stop talking and we’re like a couple of riggish rabbits. We couldn’t get more if we tried.’), so why the hurry?

  Secretly, even though David knew all about the affair with Harry, the thought of marrying worried Rachel: she had tied herself so completely, without legal binding, to Harry, that part of her would, she felt, inevitably always belong to him. Even tonight, with the whole festival celebrating, and glory flavouring the moment, she could not give David any immediate or convincing answer.

  ‘But I love you Rachel. I know the problems.’

  She frowned, leaning in his arms. ‘Can’t we just go on as we are for the time being, love? I really don’t know if I believe in marriage, not the kind of marriage our parents believed in anyway.’

  ‘The provider and the little woman? You know I don’t altogether believe in that either, but I do believe that you can build up a unit with someone, something more flexible than the old idea, but a marriage nevertheless.’

  ‘Just a little longer, David please.’

  ***

  Edward Crispin quietly enjoyed himself, wholly self-reliant in his own way. His few friends were of his own choice and his life lay within the boundaries of his work. Tonight he felt satisfied, at ease and fulfilled. His Iago, if not brilliant, had the stamp of depth and complete characterization to it, he knew that. To have created and interpreted as he had done gave Crispin more contentment than most men got from the usual sidekicks in life, the things after which they seemed to hustle so urgently, like sex or power, or drink even. Edward Crispin relaxed with a gin and tonic, did not push or obtrude, he merely sat back, a shade pretentiously perhaps, knowing that if there was some bonanza to come, some added pleasure, it would arrive in his path without him having to sweat around looking for it.

  Maurice Kapstein was behaving himself and it paid off in large dividends. Slowly, during rehearsals, he had wrapped Shylock around himself, and the knowledge that his night was near seemed to give him new accuracy of balance and judgment. At the party he took little to drink and was affable to everybody. It was around midnight that he sought out the pretty Eve Lester, with whom he had clashed at the reception for the company and who, that night, had walked on in Othello and, on Friday, would be walking on in The Merchant.

  ‘I have reason to believe that you have been avoiding me.’

  ‘Oh, Mr. Kapstein.’ The girl felt the disturbing flush of embarrassment. ‘Avoiding you? No.’ Inexpertly lied.

  ‘My dear girl, you have been avoiding me since the day of my arrival here, and it is no wonder. I made a lewd, salacious pass at you during the party for the company. I was rather drunk and now I apologize.’

  ‘There’s really no need...’

  ‘There is a great deal of need. Can I talk to you now?’

  She was naturally hesitant. ‘Of course, but aren’t there people here who you need to...I mean there are important people.’

  ‘Important? Who’s important?’

  She mentioned the names of two powerful television men with whom Kapstein had been for most of the evening.

  ‘Those predators?’ There was the right amount of loathing in his tone. ‘Do you know what important people, like those people, will do to you? They’ll take you and fill you with pride, they’ll feed you on it until you are fat and juicy; then they’ll ravage you with their fangs, chew you into small pieces, suck every ounce of sweet talent from you and spit out the remains, like husks from a combine harvester.’

  ‘That’s a very cynical attitude.’

  ‘Cynical? What else can a man be at my time of life? There is nothing else to be at my age, in this shallow and fearful time, but cynical. Even you, the youth of the moment, have a great strain of cynicism and disbelief running through your ways.’

  She warmed to him, sober, Maurice Kapstein was a much more interesting possibility. ‘Ah, but we’re only cynical because of the results we can see; the results of the generations that have gone before us. We see the inaccurate standards, the false motives, the faked picture, the political confidence trick that’s led to guilt, war, misery, famine, poverty, pollution, agony.’

  Kapstein, smiling, held up a hand. ‘Child, don’t talk to me about poverty, pollution or agony. I promise you that your generation will not make much difference to that: no more than mine did. Maybe you are all more aware: and that’s because your fathers have almost perfected the communications industry. But I doubt, in the end, if you’ll use your early wisdom with any more ability than we did.’

  They talked for over an hour, Morrie at his best, making remarks calculated to bait the girl into friendly attack. Slowly they drifted from politics to individual achievement, and he talked to her about his own life, the fascinating stories of the Theatre as it had been, glittering illustrations of the great names he had known; when he was on form like this, Kapstein could paint three-dimensional pictures with words, turning the mind into a living galaxy of time past. Without realizing it, Eve Lester was trapped by the actor’s personality. A few months ago she had lain on her bed, sick with loathing at the thought of being alone, or close, to Kapstein. That night, she returned with him to his room as docile as a hand-reared lamb, and then behaved with an abandon she had never approached with the handful of boys who were, until now, her only intimate experience.

  It restored Kapstein’s faith in himself also. After a long naked churning and wrestling, during which he brought her to a climax twice (the second time mutually with himself), he did as he always claimed: turned her over, slapped her three hearty times on her backside, and boomed—

  ‘Now you see what it’s like to be with a man.’

  All she could do was marvel at both the man and her own tingling, new and exciting experience.

  Carol Evans waited for five minutes after Douglas left the exhibition, before wandering off again towards the theatre restaurant and the party. She had a roving eye tonight, though it was Douglas whom she really felt need for. Asher Grey was firmly locked within the clattering jaws of Julia Philips, so there was no joy to be had there. Carol took a couple of drinks and joined in the general chatter, dancing with a couple of the unattached company members, always at the edge of turning on but never quite making it.

  At around twelve-thirty, she decided to call it a night and made for the main door. It was crisply cold by this time, the night clear but more wintery than early spring. She stood for a moment allowing her eyes to adjust to the darkness, then set off towards the house, taking a dozen paces before seeing the dark shape lumbering unsteadily to her right from the edge of the lawn.

  She quickened her step, then, with a quiver of fear in the back of her throat, called out, ‘Who’s there? Who is it?’

  ‘That’s the black and beauteous Carol Evans. C’mere Carol Evans.’ Joe Thomas, slurred and throaty.

  ‘Joe?’

  ‘Yeah. Come to me you livin’ symbol of desire; you roisterin’, bucking piece of magnificence.’

  She laughed,
beginning to move towards him. ‘You’re pretty drunk, Joe.’

  ‘Pissed out of my ragin’ skull, babe. C’mon, help your poor strugglin’ soul brother.’

  ‘Mind how you go.’ She put an arm around him for support; he reeked of whisky and obviously found walking impractical, his progress charted in a tacking motion.

  By holding on to his upper arms, Carol was able to steer him safely into the house. Getting upstairs proved to be a long and unsteady business, each stair being a new and delicate obstacle, but, by the time they got to Joe’s landing he seemed more in control of himself.

  ‘Thanks baby,’ he breathed when they arrived at his door. He took a deep breath and started to sort through his keys, finally getting the right one and opening the Yale lock. She switched on the lights for him and stood back so that he could enter.

  ‘After you, lady.’ The smile lopsided, though his eyes seemed in better focus.

  ‘No, I’ll leave you now, Joe. Time you were in bed.’

  ‘Agreed, agreed. After you.’

  More to humour him, Carol moved inside the apartment, she felt tired now, wanting only the comfort of her own bed and the soft sensation of sheets around her naked body.

  Joe came in slowly, more steady now, the grin as stupid though. Quietly he closed the door.

  ‘You’re what I’ve needed all night, honey.’ Low.

  ‘Open the door Joe, I’m going home to bed. You’re too drunk anyway.’

  His face became alive with anger; it was like triggering an explosion. ‘You git your clothes off and your frame on to that bed through there and I’ll show you if I’m too drunk.’