Pieces of Soap

by Stanley Elkin

  In the event, I am delighted to be at the Landers, thrilled in fact. And I can say exactly what it was like. It was like turning sixteen and getting your driver’s license, receiving, I mean, the high privilege of doing what real people do. Because the guy is right, the grass is greener, and I wish I had Ross Winter’s guts, or his dancers’ bodies, or Ross Winter’s guts in his dancers’ bodies. Having it all on the low mean average. Not to fuss. Because I don’t know how they do it. Hi-diddle-de-dee or no hi-diddle-de-dee, it can’t be much of a picnic to have to live in America the Third World life.

  To live it on a lark, of course, is a different story. Though it’s odd, I’m thinking at the time, that I don’t much care for backstage, that I find it oppressive, in fact. (David Kruger says the Landers’s “stage-house”—the term for the dressing rooms and work areas, everything not properly the auditorium—is badly in need of attention.) Indeed, the stagehouse is itself a sort of Third World, as cluttered and underdeveloped as a favela. Everywhere are cables, ladders, light trees, sets, wardrobe racks, sound equipment, props and gels and Styrofoam cups, all the detritus of fast-food lunch, all theatrical schmutz, all dramatical squalor.

  But mine ain’t the only game in town. The company will perform two different programs in Springfield—“Pretty Fooles and Peasantries,” “Silver,” “Hard Day,” “Tango Freeze,” “Continents,” and “Lemurs” Friday; “Flashpoint,” “Canon Studies,” “Hidden Walls of Time,” and “Joan Cohen” Saturday—and they’re doing the techs, not run-throughs exactly so much as a fitful electronic blocking on the new stage, vetting the audio. The dancers, for all their flexibility, are hostage to equipment. If movies are, as they say, a director’s medium, then movies are the exception, for all the other performing arts belong to the technicians.

  Indeed, watching the rehearsals, one is reminded of the book on movie stars, all the rap about the downside of glamour. The cliché must be true about the poor dears bored in their trailers. It’s like the army, or being on time for your doctor appointments, like hurry-up-and-wait enterprises everywhere. These folks are disciplined but, not like me out of harm’s way on my chair on the stage—where the easel once stood that identified an act in old vaudeville days. First, I can’t make out Ross and David’s soft conferences, David’s mumbled relays to James in the booth. I don’t even understand Ross’s minimalist comments to his dancers, his remote-control ways, the data they seem to store about stages everywhere in their collective show-biz unconscious, a stage’s invisible cuts and primes and vectors, all its unmarked markings paced off in their heads meticulously as the universal weights and measures of duelists’ strides. Ross waves them over or calls them in. He moves them about like a manager adjusting his fielders.

  It’s very technical.

  And, that night, it’s the technical side that blows, the equipment that fails.

  I’m seated beneath the overhang of the first balcony near the back of the house, in a good seat on a side aisle. I want to get a feel for the demographics. Which are sparsish, a scant sparsish of demographics. Better than a handful, oh way better, but hardly the “pretty good house tonight” that the house manager promised, driven, I think, by hi-diddle-de-dees of his own, as if—Kansas, Springfield, St. Louis: I’m an old hand by now—the body counts and reassurances were intended to dish the same calming hush-hush politicals as government handouts in a war zone, say. Only kindly meant, servicing, stroking some perceived need for the old there-theres, palpable in performers as an open wound. Except I’m only crippled up, not blind. There are, oh, perhaps 150 summery souls in the demographics tonight. In a theater built to hold 1,000. Of these the vast majority are women. Plus, of course, a bun-head contingent of little girls and their younger brothers. A smattering (maybe) of the underwriters, patrons, benefactors, contributors, and sponsors of Springfield Ballet listed in the program. Most in frocks, the comfortable, neutral, down-home dowdy of people who have nothing to prove.

  And they are appreciative, generous. On our side, they laugh in the right places, applaud with enthusiasm. Though they are so thinly spread out, I doubt if the dancers receive their message. I’ve noticed an audience’s sound is tricky to hear onstage, as though acoustics were a one-way street, or the stage a transmitter, the house a receiver. Though the observation must be tempered. The dancers have told me they frequently speak to each other onstage, not pepper talk but flashing the clipped, distant early warning of contingency, guiding each other through the lifts and all the double- and triple-time of their close-order drill arrangements. Close to them as I am when we do “Joan Cohen,” I’ve never heard them. So that’s another thing—dead spots like the lead opaques of Superman’s vision, all the willed limits of transmission, all reined-in, shut-lipped, back-of-the-throat pronouncements. For Performers’ Ears Onlys like the cleric’s promptings and inaudibles to the bride and groom at a wedding.

  But something’s up—or down—with the sound system. MADCO’s tapes are incompatible with the Landers’s sound equipment. There’d been trouble at the technical, some missing-nail thing in the tape deck in a for-want-of-a-nail sequence, temporarily papered over by a run out to Radio Shack by somebody in one of the crews. (The Landers has a crew of its own.) Tonight, when the curtain rises and the lights come on, the bouncy, lusty music for “Pretty Fooles and Peasantries” is neither bouncy nor lusty. Indeed, it is scarcely heard. Certainly the dancers, who must take their cues and rhythm from it, have trouble hearing it. (What happened was this: The papered-over part tears. David, backstage, stage-managing, sends an SOS. James leaves his post at the light board and rushes to the second balcony, where their guy is running the sound equipment. James punches up the sound levels, amplifies the amplification. It’s like Scotty giving the Enterprise warp speed by rubbing two sticks together. Afterward their guys will say our guys had improperly plugged something or other into something or other. It’s a their guys/our guys thing, an honest-to-God territorial dispute.)

  After the intermission the sound is back where it should be, but it’s too late. The dancers are in a foul mood, David and James furious, Ross depressed. Personally I don’t see what’s so terrible, and argue so. They were pretty good despite, I tell them after the show. But there’ll be no hanging out tonight. Again.

  I am dressed in my suit of lights—my Brooks Brothers Golden Fleece and special-ordered pants. And, give or take a row, pretty much in the same seat I’d occupied the previous night. I’m not nervous so much (though I’m nervous) as apprehensive, and not so much apprehensive as a wee gone with guilt. More than a wee. Why am I here? I don’t have Ross’s mission. The Regional Arts Commission, Arts and Education Council of Greater St. Louis, and Missouri and Illinois arts councils don’t fund me to build an audience for modern dance. Build an audience? If I had my way, I’d disassemble what’s here.

  Though it’s hardly SRO, or even the mythic “pretty good house” of our comforter’s reports and special pleading, it’s up from last night. Maybe 250. Many are little girls, even more than on Friday. More homemakers, too. I’m thinking of what I heard two ladies say to each other after MADCO’s performance in Winfield: “Pretty neat, wasn’t it?” “Oh, I thought it was real good.” This far south in Kansas, I remember thinking, people sound as if they’re from Oklahoma. It could be, this grammar, this music, this language of placed persons, the true, sweet, inflected neighborlies of Prairie itself.

  Because I know what’s coming after intermission.

  Me. Yours truly’s coming, the larky, city-slicker Jew with his love rabbi and his love rabbi’s blow-job conversations and his love rabbi’s death jive. Right here in walnut-bowl country, deep in the cavern counties, hard by Orville & Betty’s two-buck ham ’n’ egg breakfasts. In Passion Play territory. Only it’s not like it sounds. I swear it isn’t. I’m not afraid of them. I’m not. I just don’t want to upset anyone’s apple cart or ruffle the feathers. I would leave everyone’s dander down where I found it. I’ve no desire to build an audience, even my own.
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  Only it goes without a hitch. Technical or spiritual. The applause is even more generous than last night. There are curtain calls. I get roses.

  It’s Ross ringing me in my room, can he come over.

  He sits in one of those light, polypropylene, contoured shell chairs, universal as coat hangers. He’s drinking a generic 1.75-liter bourbon with ginger ale. I’m dressed, sprawled on the bedspread. He drinks, I think, recalling “affairs,” like a Jew.

  “I thought show people,” I tell him, “were supposed to be sentimental, ceremonial. Well, those awards shows, those Oscars and Tonys, that Lifetime Achievement crap. Well those curtain calls, well those roses.” We’re really talking about Darla, who drove off after the performance with her parents and boyfriend and scarcely a word to anyone. “I’d expected a scene, counted on a scene. At least toasts, at least hugs and handshakes and the we’ll-meet-agains people taking their leave owe each other out of respect for endings, rites of passage. My turnout ain’t any better than Darla’s.”

  “Well,” says Ross, “maybe not everyone can throw herself on the mercy of the court with your abandon.”

  Ross is in a mood. Not a bad mood. Actually he’s rather pleased with how things turned out. Especially after last night’s performance. He blames the dancers. “They should have gone to their battle stations.”

  We’re gossiping, getting down. I have to be careful what I ask him. He won’t duck a question. He tells me what he makes, he gives the reasons he broke up with his wife.

  “Do you ever think of leaving St. Louis?”

  “I think of changing my life. I don’t mind about the money. You can decorate an apartment quite nicely with what people throw away. I would have taken that floor lamp. I didn’t because it was ugly. Some street people have no taste at all.”

  And ah, I’m thinking, ah, the young ’uns out on the town, me and Ross waiting up for them, bandying our eleventh-hour truck-farm confessions and plans, talking all the high and dry, buddy-stranded locutions of lull.

  “Well,” Ross said, “I don’t socialize with them anyway. They’re my tribal family, I’m their elder. It’s nothing personal. I guess Liz was teacher’s pet. If I had one. By dint of long tenure, her right-hand-man manners. Droit de right-handedness.”

  “I have to laugh,” I say. “You know what they said at the reception? ‘Springfield needed to hear that.’ Jesus! Want some gum? I chew lots of gum since I quit smoking.”

  “I don’t chew gum. In Australia, during my formative gum-chewing years, it was rationed. Now it’s too frustrating. I feel I should be able to break it down and eat it.”

  “I understand. I really do.”

  If the place had room service I’d have sent out long ago. There’s nothing to nosh but gum, but we’re all over the board. We could be in Cincinnati, I’m thinking.

  “Liz used to be a mouse,” Ross says. “She used to dance with her body screaming ‘Don’t look.’ And it hasn’t quite clicked with Ellen yet that she’s there solely for the pleasure of the audience. She’s too shy with her talents. She has to learn to throw them out into the house. An audience wants to be flashed.”

  Paul’s too intense, Ross says. He’s very smart but too intense. In a mood, Ross doodles his dancers. Of the women, Raeleen’s the strongest. Jeff has the best stretch and turnout, the most extension. Michael is a teddy bear and could be a wonderful dancer. He watches too much TV.

  “Too much TV?”

  “Turnout, extension, strength, and stretch are important. Mind is a dancer’s most important instrument.”

  Liz, James, Jeffrey, and David are at the door.

  “Come in,” I say, flattered, “come in. Come in.”

  “Is Ross around?”

  “Come in.”

  Jeffrey, subdued, is already anxious to leave. After Friday’s performance he went for a walk. He’d been thinking about his career. He didn’t get back to the motel until 2:00 AM He was pretty tired, he said. He thought he’d better get going.

  Ross is using my bathroom. Liz says, “He has to know.”

  “Tonight? Come on,” David says, “tonight was terrific. Don’t bother him tonight.”

  “He should know. I don’t care, he should. David, James, I’m going to tell him.”

  “Jeffrey should tell him.”

  “He just told us.” When Ross comes back Liz says, “Ross, that Saturday Jeffrey missed rehearsal? When he said he’d made plans? He was in Chicago auditioning with Shirley Mordine’s company.”

  Ross didn’t say anything for a while. I know that’s what they all say, that they don’t say anything for a while. Or that they blanch, go white as the unimpeachable testimony of Darla’s clown-white pain, but that’s what happened. Maybe there’s a muse of the autonomic physiologicals for bad news, or when you’ve been let down, badly disappointed, some Muse of the Involuntary Facials, and a muse working, too, when he recovers, finally speaks. The Muse of At a Loss, Vamp ’til Ready.

  “If he’d asked I’d have let him. I would. It’s helpful for a young dancer to audition, to get someone else’s opinion of what he does wrong. I’d have let him.”

  “Did he get the job?” I ask.

  “He says he has a good feeling,” Liz says.

  “You know Jeffrey,” David says, “he has a good feeling if the ketchup on his hamburger isn’t green.”

  “I’m dissolving the company.”

  “Ross, you’re upset.” Liz is stroking his arm, giving out comfort like first aid.

  “Darla’s gone. Liz is moving with James to Arizona. Now Jeffrey? I’m dissolving MADCO. It’s my company, I can do what I please.”

  “And put the others out of work?”

  “Sleep on it, Ross,” James advises. “You’re upset. Don’t make rash decisions when you’re upset.”

  “I’m a grown man. I’ll make rash decisions when I please. More than just wedding bells are breaking up that old gang of mine,” he tells him. “I’ll tell them tomorrow.”

  But he doesn’t. The Muse of Second Thoughts.

  When Ross sent Jeffrey’s check he thanked him for his patience but told him he was not being asked back for next season due to his lack of professionalism and commitment to the company. The women have been replaced, but until he can find a replacement for Jeffrey, they’ll be dancing with two men, not three; six dancers, not seven. They book programs in advance. “Continents” may have to be dropped from the repertoire, though Paul thinks that with a quick costume change either he or Michael ought to be able to double up on one of the parts. “Hidden Walls of Time” and “Pretty Fooles and Peasantries” are definitely out, as is, of course, “Notes Toward a Eulogy for Joan Cohen. “

  The Irony Muse that plucks my gig and leaves this crippled-up old soul hi-diddle-de-deeless. Until, at least, Life breathes on my life again, the all-embracing Muse of Lark and Unexpected Compensations.

  AN AMERICAN IN CALIFORNIA

  I

  To pass carte blanche into the heart of the clichés, that’s the proposal, power dining, power this and power that, spooning like meat from a melon the key to all mythologies, translating California to my foreign tongue. It’s my idea to see the high points, in the footsteps of tourists following, in the shade of the points of interest, by all myth’s scenic overviews, in California’s busy surf, all the PR of a tanned and chosen people; to the Proposition State come, the invented land. I’m this pilgrim from the folks, this now voyager, who would tour fantasy itself—sit where the deals are made, next year’s history now; smell the stars close up; do tea with Ann Getty; come to see the fashions like wonders of the world—who will go home not empty-handed or brokenhearted but with his notions tampered.

  I’m, as I say, the consultant, this self-proclaimed geography guru, volunteering to explain California like some miracle rabbi the meaning of life in a joke. My agenda shining on me, bringing it in from the deep Midwest, middle America in general, St. Louis in particular, coughing it up out of the Central Standard Time zone, dealing
in mean-average meanings—in all the central standards; in the middle of the road; rock solid; steeped in clichés—the changes of seasons, the traditional values—as in a kind of tea. And more power to me because I am damaged—this is not incidental—this like holy cripple, this heart-bypassed, foot-braced, chip-toothed, balding old gent, morning-breath’d all hours of the day and night, a lowardly mobile, body-imaged chap whose opinions are all the more precious to him because if suffering teaches you anything, it teaches you to take yourself seriously. And what I’m seriously thinking, I allow to Andy—the writer from the magazine come to pick me up—is that the cool, canned voice giving crowd-control over the LAX P.A. is precisely that of a nurse in a hospital calling out in the most pleasant, neutral tones for all the docs in the world to come running, make a note, Andy. Officious, I’m officious. Because I make allowances and give myself leeway and professional courtesies like a golfer playing through. Make a note, make a note! Because the meter is running and I’m developing a theory—that the state is laid-back because that’s only fitting in a place where the sun is the state bird. Though in the strictest sense, of course—ain’t it some electronics musician in Oakland who’s working on a kinder, gentler siren to stick on fire engines, ambulances, and police cars for emergencies?—it could be laid-back because it’s committed to some principle of not spooking the horses. On the other hand, I confide to Andy—I’ve lots of theories, up to my toneless old ass in them—it may not be laid-back at all, finally. All those cars in all that traffic could indicate how the Puritan ethic lives on out here in the high-tech mode, that folks are so righteous and unlaid-back, there’s probably room in their lives only for drive time, office time, and quality time with the kids (which might explain—you think?—the presence of so many expensive, upscale automobiles I see out the window, how if Californians spend so much time in and money on their cars, well, it’s not for the show of it at all, probably, not prestige so much as creature comfort, the holistics of horsepower, really, the leather-option package a sort of prosthesis, more essential to health, finally, than to grooming). Oh, sure, I revise, it’s to stay fresh for the office, fresh for the day, fresh for the return trip to the family. Why, come to think, California must be the quality-time capital of the world—the dads out-daddying and moms out-mommying, leading the nation, beating the band, spotting the rest of the country a one- to three-hour time differential and sending it messages anyway of all the what-will-be’s. Hey, Andrew?