My Life, Starring Dara Falcon

by Ann Beattie

  “I barely remember the play.”

  “Well, you know, it’s about the noble, long-suffering wife of a man named Torvald, and she’d do anything for Torvald and she has: she’s made some terrible affiliation with some atrocious man in order to borrow money so Torvald can go away because of his illness.” She shrugged out of the dress. She was wearing a peach-colored slip. She reached up and took a dress from a peg and dropped it over her head. “Presto!” she said. Her hair was dishevelled. She shook it, disarranging it more. “I’ll have to tell you about it, sweetie. About my big problem with thinking she never should have been so long-suffering to begin with, because who is this Torvald? She’s supposed to be so self-sacrificing. She gets so trapped. I mean, she wasn’t an animal bounding through the snow who felt something go snap on its leg, was she? Who was she before Torvald? I mean, it’s astonishing: Ibsen doesn’t think we should care.”

  I hardly followed her description of the plot. She’d been speaking in a rush, talking quickly as she applied fresh powder. She was looking at herself, as best she could, in the windowpane.

  “That was an impassioned description, wasn’t it?” she said, turning toward me. “I do that, sometimes. If I have to think about something really, really upsetting, I change the subject to something else. I even do that if I’ve only been thinking to myself. It’s like I’m terrified to let myself really think something through. It doesn’t matter about some stupid play. What’s the next act for Dara and Tom? That’s what I don’t want to get to.”

  “It doesn’t seem entirely within your control,” I said.

  She looked at me, and her eyes started to widen, but then they narrowed again. “It hurts, like a physical pain,” she said. “I think I’m going to lose him.”

  “You won’t lose him,” I said, though I had nothing to base that on.

  “I’ve set you up,” Dara said. “What else can you say? ‘Yes, you’re sure to lose him’?”

  “I don’t say things because I’m set up,” I said. But my voice wasn’t steady. I did, indeed, say things because they were expected of me; all too often, I certainly did say whatever was expedient to reinforce the status quo. I tried to speak again, to tell her the truth. But what was the truth? Tom was going to be the one who decided their future. “I didn’t say that because it was what you wanted to hear,” I said, trying to sound indignant.

  It only made her laugh, though that didn’t even make me angry. Because it was such an honest laugh—a quick, ephemeral laugh I’d never heard before and wouldn’t hear again.

  “No, of course not. Forgive me,” she said, joining me in my own game.

  We left the room quickly after that. Finally, she broke the silence. When she did, she sounded like the old Dara: overly animated; a person who spoke like a straight shooter, hiding her indirection behind perfect eloquence, measured sentences.

  We left Snell’s together. “This is embarrassing,” she said, “but I have to ask you, because I don’t have any choice. I’m short of cash. Do you have a twenty I could borrow?”

  “Of course,” I said.

  “Thanks,” she said, pocketing the money I took out of my wallet. She waved her hand above her head to say goodbye, running to her car. Halfway there she turned and simply looked at me, hands at her sides. Her unhappy expression made her Botticelli hair seem merely dishevelled; her body slumped. Her eyes widened, but this time they widened hopefully. Expectantly. But I’d had all I could take.

  “I’ll call you later in the week. Maybe we can go to the beach now that the opening is over,” I called to her.

  “That is definitely a good idea,” she said. As she turned, the words fell like Ping-Pong balls behind her.

  I went back inside. The air-conditioning felt good. The music was pleasant. The plants in their white pots were nice, too. Bob and I had perennials planted around the house, but inside there were no houseplants. I picked out a purple flowering plant with long, tongue-shaped leaves. The little plastic marker said it was Streptocarpus X Hybridus. I took it to the counter. As the boy rang up the sale, I picked up a flyer advertising an orchid show in a nearby town, and thought how many things there were to see and do during the summer, and how few of them I actually did. Driving home, I decided that I would put the plant in the center of the dining room table and see how long it took Bob to notice it. He noticed every little thing when he was hiking—I couldn’t believe he wouldn’t now, though it had been a long time since I’d gone hiking with him—or he’d notice a new chair on a neighbor’s porch, or even spy wind chimes in a tree, or ask whether so-and-so had always had an old unpowered lawnmower. He was good-natured when he was teased about not noticing people’s physical appearance. He didn’t even know the colors of his relatives’ eyes—though he did know mine. But would he notice if I did something different with my hair? I thought about the discussion the little girl had had with her mother about bangs. Then when I got home, I washed my hair and trimmed it, lifting little strands of hair and slowly cutting bangs, which I hadn’t had since college. I painted my fingernails pink, then put on a second coat of red, knowing he would never notice the pearly, subtle color. I placed the plant on the table and, as I did, I thought that maybe altering my physical appearance had been a way to divert his attention from the plant. I had become wary of Bob. His mood had been swinging between opposite poles: argumentative; silent. I wanted to shake him up—to emphasize the fact that we thought differently about things; to announce that I could purchase a plant from Tom Van Sant, and that the world wouldn’t end. Bob was so territorial. So set in his ways. I had been too agreeable, rarely contradicting him, making whatever adjustments were necessary so he could proceed to do things his way. I was looking for a fight, though I didn’t know it at the moment. Later, when Bob voiced his dismay about my buying a plant from the competition, I found myself asking shrilly if Warner’s stocked Streptocarpus X Hybridus. I felt blood rush to my face as I bent over the marker to remind myself exactly what the plant was named. As I straightened up, I saw the look of dismay on his face.

  “Well, aren’t you the authority?” he said. “How unfortunate that our greenhouse is so empty of something that’s momentarily struck your fancy. Maybe I need to think seriously about the significance of that, Jean: maybe it’s time to admit that somebody just doesn’t have what you want.”

  My discussion with Dara about A Doll’s House took place in Portsmouth the following week, in Prescott Park. She had urged me to read it, and I’d found it at a used-book store, where I’d also bought some funny old cookbooks, including The Harried Hostess, which was about what to make in half an hour when your husband called from work to say he’d be bringing his boss home. The illustration on the front was what had gotten my attention: a stick-figure woman racing across the cover with a platter held above her head, her long, Medusa-curly hair drawn in great detail by an artist who clearly was more interested in women’s hair than in what or how they cooked. I had it in my bag, along with the book containing three of Ibsen’s plays and several items I’d stopped at the hardware store to get for Bob. I had packed lunch for the two of us: turkey sandwiches with no mayonnaise. In a separate little bag was sliced tomato and lettuce from the garden. I’d also brought clippings of fennel and basil. Dara sucked thoughtfully on a stalk of fennel. We each had a bottle of peach-mango juice. There were oatmeal cookies from the health-food store for dessert.

  “It’s one of the great roles, of course, but it can be so awkward when you have to find a new way into the character because, well, because the world has changed,” Dara said.

  I had read the play the night before, quickly. My question was: If a play was great, wasn’t it because it said something true about human nature, rather than because it was a period piece?

  Dara said that it seemed to her that while a play might present truths about human nature, unless they were completely familiar—clichés, almost—most so-called truths could be seen as a socially agreed upon morality arising out of a certain time
and place. The important question would be whether, once removed from those conditions, there would still be a way to relate to a character who held particular values: to become the character without being condescending. Although she could see Nora’s dilemma (“Not that I haven’t found myself in a few dilemmas, also, lest we forget”), she was frustrated with Nora; she felt that she could have acted differently from the first—let her husband find his own way out of his situation—rather than assume the role of martyr. Really, her frustration was with Ibsen: he had set up Nora; he both romanticized women and then taught them a moral lesson because he wanted to punish or destroy the limited creatures he had doomed them to be.

  “I can’t keep thinking this way. It has nothing to do with getting into the role and making all this live,” she said.

  I wanted to say something intelligent, but when I read, I never thought to question what was there. I might not believe something, based on my experience, but I never thought about whether a character had been set up.

  Two boys with long hair stood close to the water, holding their girlfriends’ hands, pointing out the navy shipyard across the water. “Fuckin’ militaristic morons, man,” one of the boys said. The wind carried their voices back to us as if they were talking at the edge of a canyon. The girls said nothing, but both boys gave the navy shipyard the finger and spat in its direction. They talked awhile longer, then turned their backs on it.

  “The important thing is to be sure not to suggest that the key to Nora is that she’s neurotic,” Dara said. “That’s all the women’s movement needs: another symbol of a self-sacrificing, frightened woman. What I have to do is make up an inner life for Nora. A life in which horrible old Torvald isn’t quite as central as he seems. She has to be acting for her own reasons.”

  It was a gorgeous September day. The light was sharp. Everyone seemed to be pouring out of offices into the park, strolling in the gardens, finding a bench to sit on, or sitting, as we were, in the grass. It would not be beautiful much longer. Once the days shortened, the sharp light would reach an apex, and then it would quickly become weaker, barely illuminating short days that would become the quick gray slide into winter.

  We were eating in silence, Dara in a funk, while I was preoccupied, wondering whether a second reading of the play would help me understand what had bothered her so much.

  “Ladies,” a man in a beige suit said, tipping his hat.

  “How are you this fine afternoon?” Dara said, coming out of her reverie.

  The man smiled, then turned to me. I had seen him somewhere before. He was elegantly dressed, with highly polished brown wing tips. He smiled, also, at me, realizing—I was sure—that I couldn’t place him.

  “Edward Quill,” he said, extending his hand and shaking first my hand, then Dara’s. Though he did not really shake Dara’s: he held it and then kissed the air a foot or so above her hand. It was the man who had come to my house to pick up the manuscript. It was Mrs. Aldridge’s fiancé.

  “A perfect day for a picnic in the park,” he said. “My mistake not to pack a lunch for myself. I ate at the new French restaurant on Bow Street. Have you been? It’s quite good, but no one could prefer sitting at a table inside on a day like this to sitting on a lawn.”

  “It’s never too late for sensual pleasures,” Dara said, patting the grass beside her. Edward Quill smiled down at her, but you could see his hesitation: his pale suit; the grass that would stain. He replaced his hat on his head.

  “Just what you ladies needed,” he said. “Someone to tell you you were having a good time, when you knew you were having a good time.”

  “ ‘In all these eight years—longer than that—from the very beginning of our acquaintance, we have never exchanged a word on any serious subject,’ ” Dara said cryptically. She looked from Edward Quill to me, and I was taken aback at her bluntness.

  “Nora, speaking to Torvald,” Edward Quill said, cutting short my embarrassment.

  I should have known Dara wouldn’t be so rude, but the whole encounter had disoriented me: How would Dara know Edward Quill?

  The explanation—as Dara explained, mischievously—was that Edward was on the board of trustees of the theater. “This is the gentleman responsible for adding Ibsen to the list of plays,” she said. “And perhaps also the gentleman responsible, in good part, for my being cast as the complicated, conflicted Nora.”

  “Not at all,” he said. “I merely enjoy attending auditions.” He turned to me. “I had been thinking of calling you, so this is a pleasant coincidence,” he said, touching his fingers slightly to the brim of his hat. “May I?” he said, gesturing toward the grass. He had decided to sit down, after all.

  “Mr. Quill, we would be delighted,” Dara said.

  He pulled his pants up slightly at the knees and crouched, settling on one hip. “You know that your friend very kindly typed Grace’s book?” Edward Quill said to Dara.

  “I was very sorry to hear about her death,” Dara said, deliberately sidestepping the question. “I know it must be very difficult for you.” As she spoke, she sounded more mock-serious than she had when she’d been reciting Nora’s line. This was the obviously false Dara. As outspoken Nora, she had totally convinced me.

  “Yes,” I said, finding my voice. “I had just had a death in the family myself. I’m afraid I wasn’t as polite as I should have been that day.” I looked at Dara. “Bob’s grandmother had just died. I didn’t even ask Mr. Quill and his friend to stay for coffee.”

  This was my performance for Edward Quill. The same day I hurried Edward Quill and Mrs. Aldridge’s relative out of the house, I had recovered myself enough to go over to Dara and Tom’s and show them my carbon copy of his fiancée’s strange book. We had had quite a few good laughs over it.

  “I was wondering,” he said, “if you thought there was any dramatic potential to Grace’s remembrances?”

  It was the last thing I would have thought. The futility of someone’s having written the book depressed me terribly. Being involved with it, even as the typist, had underscored the importance, for me, of finding something more meaningful to do with my life.

  The best thing I could think to say was “I never gave it any thought.”

  “A one-woman piece,” he said. “A commentary on marriage.”

  “Tell me a bit about this book,” Dara said. I shot her a look, but her face betrayed nothing. She looked dewy-eyed, totally enraptured with the possibility of hearing whatever Edward Quill was about to say. This was Dara at her most insincere.

  “Grace wrote her reflections on life as lived with several different husbands,” Edward Quill said. “It was her misfortune to have her three husbands die, and her way of life extremely altered, of course, as she experienced three sets of marriages.”

  This was not what the book was like at all, and Dara knew it as well as I did. For one thing, there had been two marriages she never talked about at all, and those had not ended because the men had died. In the whole book, there were no “reflections.” The reader was left with nothing that was informative or in any way illuminating. But Dara saw it differently. Or Dara meant to see it differently. I looked at her and could almost see the wheels turning.

  “A kind of social history, as seen by one woman as she wed three different men in three different times,” Dara said slowly.

  “Exactly,” Edward Quill said.

  “Something that Irene Worth would perform. Or, oh, I remember the brilliance of Siobhan McKenna, doing Molly Bloom.”

  What was Dara trying to conjure up? Siobhan McKenna, telling us that okra tasted like snot? Was this all just something she was feigning great interest in because she truly thought that this man was responsible for her getting the role of Nora?

  “I had the overwhelming sense”—he broke into his thoughts to say to me: “Please tell me if you shared this sense”—“the overwhelming sense that for Grace, as for many of us, the next possibility awaits us.” He looked across the water. “Every time, she tho
ught her life was settled,” he said. “Each time, she found that she was wrong. But Grace was a woman both loyal and optimistic. A person with a will to live and to change.”

  A person with a will to marry, perhaps, in spite of all she should have learned.

  “Marvellous,” Dara said, with mock solemnity.

  “I don’t understand what’s being written now,” Edward Quill said. “A play about two people in ash cans. That play about—some long story Mr. Albee tells, about someone named Jerry. Jerry and the dog. I don’t understand what nonsense like that has to say about the human condition.”

  “Nor do I,” Dara said. She bowed her head, as if she were in church.

  “So perhaps this is something to pursue,” Edward Quill said, slapping his hands on his knees. I tried to look polite, but neutral. Dara’s enthusiasm continued, in its dramatically understated way. When she looked up, tears glistened in her eyes.

  “I am so happy to have run into you,” he said, rising. He bowed slightly from the waist, hands behind his back. For a second, a bee hovered above his hat, but it flew away before he realized it was there. If it had stung him, I wondered if he would have shrieked, done something more spontaneous. He was, himself, like someone in a time warp. If Dara was having trouble connecting with Ibsen’s world, how could she be so magnetized by the odd Mr. Quill?

  The answer: money. He was a wealthy man. When he spoke, the theater company quickly and positively responded. At her audition, she told me, she had projected her lines to Edward Quill in the back of the auditorium. She had taken pains to make sure that what she said registered just slightly to the left of him, so that he did not feel the lines were being pitched to him. It was an old trick; when you did that, she said, it had the authority of an echo across a vast space: the person who hears it believes whatever he hears because it is overheard—it is completely convincing because it seems to have been discovered. Try it, Dara told me: Whisper barely audibly to someone at a lunch counter, for example. Tell the man next to you that he is a beast for abandoning the children, and the waitress who overhears it will instantly hate him. Much more so than if she overheard what she took to be a simple argument. “Works,” Dara said brightly.