My Life, Starring Dara Falcon

by Ann Beattie

  The loft was above a framer’s shop on Greene Street. My instructions were to press the buzzer of 4F: Grandin. Liam dragged behind; he had had to put the car in an expensive garage because there were no parking places. I tried to tell him it was better that way; at least we’d come out and still have the radio. He wasn’t to be consoled; the roads had been slushy and narrow laned, and because he had to teach the next morning, we couldn’t stay overnight. With his downcast eyes and pursed lips, he was letting me know he was doing me a favor.

  There were instructions inside about buzzing again if the elevator wasn’t on the ground floor. Liam reached around me and hit the buzzer. I was usually the one a step or two behind him: if he lagged behind, it was because he was perturbed; it always took me a while to react, but Liam took in many things at once, and reacted quickly.

  The elevator descended, with four people inside. I didn’t know three of them, but unexpectedly, Trenton was in the elevator. He smiled. It took me a minute to realize whom I was looking at, partly because I didn’t expect to see him, and partly because he had a bright green wool hat pulled down over his eyebrows. “I’m not a ghost,” Trenton said.

  I wasn’t worried about that; I was wondering who else from New Hampshire might be at the play if Trenton was. I felt suddenly shaky, seeing him. “Hi,” I said, finally recovering myself.

  “Hello,” he said. “I’m Trenton,” he said, extending his hand to Liam. “And these people and I were apparently buzzed back before we got to the fourth floor.”

  “Terribly sorry,” Liam said. “We saw that the lift had disappeared and read the sign saying we should ring for it.”

  “Same thing happened the last time I saw a performance here,” a man in a down vest said. The thin woman at his side said nothing. Neither did the other woman. We began to slowly rise. This time, the elevator bumped to a stop in front of a fire door. Someone inside the loft pushed back the door.

  “Are you just in town for the play?” I said.

  “I dropped a couple of paintings off at the gallery. But I’m here to see Dara. Yeah.”

  “I never thanked you for writing me that note, back in September. It was nice of you.”

  What I really wanted was to move away from him. I did regret that I hadn’t responded, but the note hadn’t really required a response. Seeing Trenton was reminding me of other people in Dell, and I didn’t want to be reminded.

  The girl who had opened the door gave us programs. They were photocopies, on lavender Edward Quill Productions paper. Gold sealing wax, with an intertwined E and Q, had been applied to the front. I glanced inside and saw his preface. On the opposite page was a small photograph of Dara and information about other plays she had acted in. We sat halfway down the rows of card chairs: there were ten or twelve rows of about ten seats each, all covered with bright red cushions. So far, only a few people were sitting down. I caught a faint smell of incense, and also cooking grease; above us, it sounded like someone was moving furniture. Liam busied himself, taking off his coat and scarf and draping them over the back of his chair. I could sense that he wanted to know more about Trenton. I was hoping Trenton would sit away from us, but instead, he sat directly behind me.

  “Did you know I’d been painting Dara?” Trenton said.

  “Trenton is a painter,” I said to Liam.

  “I gathered,” he said.

  “I guess you and Bob did some hiking in the fall,” I said, reluctantly drawn into conversing with Trenton, but not wanting to talk about Dara.

  “Yeah, Bob really got into it. We took a trip to L. L. Bean and got some gear.”

  “Camping, you say?” Liam said. “I used to love it. Haven’t done it in years.”

  “Liam teaches at the university,” I said.

  “That doesn’t preclude my camping, I hope,” Liam said. It was not likely I could say or do anything now to get on his good side. He seemed as annoyed with me as I was with Trenton.

  “You’re looking great,” Trenton said, touching me on the shoulder. “It’s good to see you.”

  He was a nice person; it was just that I didn’t want to talk to him. I was also afraid that unless we stopped talking, Trenton would start giving me news of people in Dell. The sharp odor of onion began to suffuse the room. Upstairs, people were dragging things across the floor. Furniture had also been pushed back against the far wall of the loft we sat in: sofas; chairs; torchères; marble tables.

  “Who is our host?” Trenton said.

  “I don’t know,” Liam said. He looked at me. “A friend of hers, is it?”

  “He’s somebody who works on Wall Street. I’m not sure exactly what he has to do with the theater. He’s a friend of Quill’s, I think. They met in London.”

  It was a full recitation of everything I could remember about the man in whose loft we sat. I had no idea what he looked like, or what, exactly, he did; I only knew that he had made the evening possible.

  “I forgot to ask Dara what he looked like,” Trenton said. He got up. “Maybe he’s in that group over there,” he said, and walked down the aisle, to a group of four men talking.

  “Quite nice of him, wanting to introduce himself to our host,” Liam said.

  “Why are you so mad at me?” I said.

  “Well, to tell you the truth, I felt like you were embarrassed to be seen with me, you were so reluctant to introduce me. I mean, you do have your moods, you know. I frankly think that it was folly to drive to New York on this particular night. If it’s on all week, I don’t see why some premonition of yours needs to be heeded.”

  “I’m sorry I made you come,” I said.

  “Oh, I’m probably making too much of it. My own nervousness about driving in bad weather.” He took my hand. “Sorry,” he said.

  “We’re both moody,” I said.

  More people entered the loft. Every face that was unfamiliar put me more at ease. A tall girl in a long brown monk’s coat came in, holding a little dog. Two men dressed in suits and overcoats came in behind her. Their eyes scanned the crowd. They went to the first row and took a long time taking off their coats, folding them, and putting them on a chair. Then they sat down, with the coats stacked between them, one seat apart. Every time the elevator went down and came up again, more people entered the room. They all looked striking; it was clear that we were attending a performance in New York. Trenton came back, saying that he had just met Andre Gregory, who told him our host was flying in from the West Coast, but probably would not make the beginning of the performance. The man’s wife was here, though—or at least she was rumored to be here.

  Edward Quill came down the aisle, striding purposefully in a black suit and black-and-white saddle shoes. His shirt was tangerine, his tie imprinted with crossed-out squiggles that looked like a very impatient person’s telephone-pad doodlings.

  “Face-lift,” Trenton whispered, as Edward Quill passed.

  “You mean Quill?” I whispered back.

  “You sounded just like Dara then,” Trenton said. “Yeah. Apparently this was supposed to happen a week or so later, but it had to be bumped up because it was the only time our hostess could be in town. Dara told me Quill was in a dither. He’s got on some sort of makeup because his face is still purple.”

  “Indeed,” Liam said. The increasing strangeness was putting Liam at ease. He was looking around, taking it all in. “No stage,” he said, more to himself than to me.

  There also seemed to be no special lighting. In the twilight, the tall, dirty windows looked as if algae had grown on them.

  “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen,” Edward Quill said. When everyone did not become quiet, he clapped his hands. He stood with his feet turned out, like a ballerina. His suit jacket was tightly tapered, and the pants flared at the ankles. He unbuttoned the single button of his jacket. “The audience is asked to be silent,” Edward Quill said. I was examining his face; it looked at once taut and puffy. I thought that he had on eyeliner. I squinted, trying to see.

  “Our
performance this evening will be a one-woman monologue. Your program notes will give you information about Miss Dara Falcon’s previous acting endeavors. Let me say only that you will soon agree with me that the range of her talent is spectacular. Tonight, we are privileged to see her interpretation of one humble woman’s thought-provoking life. As a personal note, may I add that Grace Aldridge was a wonderful writer and a generous, spirited woman: poetry was inherent in her prose, and grace—for she was aptly named—abundant in her too-short life. We are indebted to our host and hostess for the evening, Mr. Jeffrey and Mrs. Constance Grandin. After the performance champagne will be served. Miss Falcon has graciously agreed to circulate to discuss the performance. Please stay to share your thoughts.” Edward Quill unclasped his hands and gripped them together again, behind his back. He bowed slightly and walked quickly to an Eames chair to the side of the open area.

  For a full minute, nothing happened. It was enough time to register the movement upstairs, the honking of horns on the street. People shifted in their seats. I was distracted when Dara appeared, coming through a swinging door from the kitchen. Behind her, I saw a butcher-block cutting board and a row of cabinets. Then the door vibrated closed, and Dara stood alone, tinier than I remembered her, in the calf-length black dress. She did such a good job of acting disoriented that I fell for it: I thought something was wrong; I thought she could not remember her lines.

  “You,” she said suddenly, pointing to a person a few rows back. When the woman did not respond, she continued to stare. The person misunderstood, just as I had: Dara was acting, but the woman she had pointed to didn’t realize it. “Yes,” the woman said, hesitantly. This provoked a ripple of nervous laughter from her companions. They understood she should not have spoken. Dara continued to stare at her, hard. The woman sensed, correctly, and too late, that her one word had been one word too many, but her friends were not easy to quiet down. “What about me, instead of her?” the man next to the woman she had initially spoken to called out. Dara’s momentum was dissipating. A shadow of worry crossed her face. “Shhh!” a woman sitting near them said. I looked at Edward Quill, sitting to the side. He was rigid. Dara whirled away from the people she had been facing, pointing again into the audience. “You,” she said again. “Have you been married? Were you a bride at nineteen?” The second woman sat taller and looked around, not sure how to respond. Dara’s pauses were so long that the audience thought the play was participatory.

  Then Edward Quill raised a mask to his face. It was flat, like a fan, and both sides—as we soon saw—depicted two different faces: the gossiping old ladies, Mrs. Bell and Mrs. Denton. It was incredibly odd, but also mesmerizing: as Quill took both parts, he alternated between a silly falsetto and a convincing, slightly Southern accented voice just slightly higher than his real voice. In the high-pitched voice, he made some observation; then, with the Southern accent, he interrupted. It was more jarring than someone singing lead and also singing backup. Then Dara’s voice began, and Quill’s two personas dwindled, though they were not entirely quiet: the gossip continued; the chaos was intentional.

  The fight that broke out upstairs, though, was not. A piece of furniture was dragged across the floor and rumbled like thunder; then a woman, her voice sharp and angry, began to scream. The people were fighting about where the dishwasher should be installed. Everyone in the audience looked at the ceiling. For a second we all considered the possibility that this, too, was part of the performance.

  “Carry on!” Edward Quill called to Dara, putting the mask on his lap and clapping his hands, but she, too, now looked at the ceiling. “The gods are angry. They are angry about the dishwasher,” she said, turning toward the audience. She shrugged: What could be done? Many people laughed at what Dara said, Liam among them. For a few seconds there was quiet, and then the dragging and scraping began again. “You would think this was a fucking tenement!” a woman in a blue fishnet dress said, jumping to her feet. “Those people upstairs are animals. Nothing but pigs. This is what happens when the co-op decides to admit tenants in the entertainment business.”

  Someone tried to get her to sit down, but instead she ran up the aisle and threw open the door, muttering to herself.

  “Our hostess?” Trenton whispered.

  “This is part of the play,” a man behind us said.

  Dara looked at me. Was it the pale, pale makeup that made her look so haggard?

  “People in the entertainment industry,” she said. “What the hell does she think yours truly does for a living?”

  Again, a few people laughed.

  The mask was at Edward Quill’s side, discarded like a handkerchief that had been used for waving once the person had departed.

  “You can back up to the dishwasher, and I’ll shove it up your ass!” the man upstairs hollered. Plates began breaking.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” Dara said, with perfect composure, “Theater of the Absurd has infiltrated tonight’s performance. Mr. Quill and I shall regroup behind the scenes and prepare to continue, after a brief intermission.”

  “I think it’s one of the Beach Boys,” someone said to someone else. “I can’t remember which one. The one that left his wife and moved in with some belly dancer.”

  Everything was breaking upstairs. Everything. People stood and said the police should be called. Many people had run out behind the woman in the fishnet dress. She was screaming outside the elevator, trying to push them away so she could go upstairs if what she called “the fucking piece of shit” ever arrived. Someone tried to reason with her. Soon there was a small fight going on outside the elevator. While I looked away, both Dara and Edward Quill had disappeared.

  “Jesus Christ,” Liam said. “If this isn’t the most preposterous—”

  “She must be devastated,” Trenton said. “I can’t believe she walked off like that.”

  “Should I go backstage?” I said, but when I turned to get his answer, I saw that he had gotten up and was walking in the direction of the elevator.

  “I should think you ought to keep out of it,” Liam said.

  “I thought Brian Wilson moved in upstairs,” someone else said.

  “This is really quite wonderful in its own way,” Liam said. “If someone filmed and recorded the audience, this could be fed into the mix on the next go-round.”

  “Liam, this is terrible.”

  “Well, of course I see that, but in another way, it really isn’t so terrible. I mean, we’re all going to be on her side once she comes out again. You know she’s going to get a terrific round of applause now, regardless of what the performance might have been.” He looked self-satisfied. “Maybe you were right,” he said. “That would be very funny: play cancelled because of a fight over a dishwasher. Did you see that in your crystal ball?”

  “Why are you making fun of me?” I said. “Didn’t what I feared come true?”

  “One could hardly have known,” he said.

  “Do you think I have any good thoughts, or intuition, about anything?” I said.

  He said nothing for a few seconds. Then he said: “Why on earth this should provoke a fight between us, I don’t know. Please accept my apology for doubting you. It’s just that you weren’t too explicit about people fighting upstairs and your friend stalking offstage. Not that it’s really a stage. But it’s all very contemporary, I understand.”

  “You’re being horrible,” I said.

  “Actually, until you began criticizing me, I was starting to enjoy myself.”

  “It’s like The Honeymooners,” someone said. “Are you too young to remember Jackie Gleason in The Honeymooners?”

  I looked around. Most people simply looked perturbed. A man a few seats away had closed his eyes and clasped his hands over his chest. Though I hated to admit it, Liam was right: a film of the audience’s reaction would be very interesting. The woman next to the snoozing man was flipping through her daybook.

  “Let’s get dinner,” another man said to the woman he was with
. She nodded and got up, picking up her hat and coat. Outside, sirens wailed to a stop. The police had arrived. Everyone got up and rushed toward the windows. I followed Liam. Before I reached his side, though, Trenton took my wrist. “This is for you,” he said. It was a note, with “Jean” written on the envelope. Trenton disappeared into the crowd as he pushed his way toward a window.

  It had to be a note from Dara. I went into the hallway, where the elevator had disappeared, either to the ground or to the floor above. There were only a few people standing around talking. I leaned against the far wall, by the emergency exit, and opened the note. How had she written it so quickly?

  Dear Jean,

  I’ve sent a couple of post cards you might not have gotten because I might have the wrong address. When Trenton told me he was going to Dara’s play I figured you’d probably be there so I asked him to give this note to you.

  I’ve been thinking about our encounter last fall and apologize if I in any way offended you. Trenton and I were talking one night and he said he always liked you but didn’t know how to be friends with you. Not because Bob would have been jealous. It’s more like neither of us could tell if you had any interest in being friends. When guys don’t know they usually back off.