Impossible Vacation

by Spalding Gray

  AFTER A FEW DAYS, when I felt better, I wrote Meg a letter:

  Dear Meg,

  My mother has killed herself, and I caught some sort of flu. I’ll come to New York as soon as I’m better.

  Love,

  Brewster

  Meg responded with a sympathetic letter and a report that she planned to go look for an apartment in New York City. She wanted to know if I was going to join her.

  There seemed to be no choice. What else was there to do but move in with Meg? I had no real love for New York City, but I desperately needed a nest, a sanctuary in which to separate myself from my loss. One thing I did know was that I couldn’t stay in Rhode Island.

  I left Dad to take that sad boat ride with Uncle Jib. They went out in Jib’s little power boat to spread Mom’s ashes over Narragansett Bay, the bay Mom had loved beyond words and, without words, died for. By that time I was safely ensconced in New York City with Meg.

  As soon as I arrived in New York I knew Meg was exactly who I needed to give me direction and motivation. She was moving books and chairs into the new apartment and she was doing it with such determination, going up those stairs and down those stairs like a little dynamo. She gave me a quick kiss on the cheek and told me to keep an eye on the car so nothing got ripped off. That much I could do. Beyond that I felt incapable of anything. Meg was this great organizer and mover, a new mother of sorts.

  She had found us a small railroad apartment up in Germantown on Ninety-third Street at Third Avenue. The rent for four very tiny rooms was only $37.55. I never understood how the landlord rounded it off to fifty-five cents. I was secretly glad that Meg had not chosen to settle in the East Village, because I really did not want to be living with a bunch of drugged-out hippies. I longed for some sort of stable, conservative environment, and that was exactly what we were in.

  We lived among the families of all the service people of New York City, the firemen, plumbers, and police. There was no one in the neighborhood like us, so there were no comparisons, no others to steal my being away. At last I was not threatened by my neighbors. They were not trying to live constantly ecstatic lives. They were living in a kind of fifties workaday world, carrying their basket of coupons to the local A&P.

  The apartment had a bathtub in the kitchen, which was a real novelty for me. Dad couldn’t believe it when I told him. “What?” he said. “A bathtub in the kitchen? How could this possibly be?” Our little bedroom consisted of a mattress, which we found on the street, and a bookcase behind it, which held my little KLH radio. We did not own a television, and neither of us missed it. At times it was like we were living somewhere back in the thirties or forties. The toilet was in a water closet at the end of the hall and we shared it with our neighbor, a very old German bachelor. The odd smell he left behind was so pungent and ancient that at times it made me feel like we were living in postwar Berlin. The toilet seat was made of old wood and there was a pull chain with a wooden handle to release the water from its sweaty trough above. We were slumming it, and it felt good, like a kind of penance for all the soft middle-class living that had gone before. We were the new WASP refugees in New York City. We fell into living a simple life together.

  The apartment was on the top floor of a five-story walk-up, and our two living-room windows, which were grated with black metal accordion gates, looked out over the defunct Jacob Ruppert Brewery, whose great empty brick edifice also reminded me of postwar Germany. On cold winter nights the wind would blow through it, tearing old metal and copper loose, and I’d wake to those foreign sounds of metal ripping instead of elm trees blowing in the wind. Also, the brewery was affined with my name, Brewster, which I always equated with brew ever since my father fed beer to me in that little one-ounce mug with the cork on the bottom. I was a hophead and no longer ashamed to admit it, living in the heart of Germantown. Nothing pleased me more than to be sitting at the table with Meg in our little kitchen sipping a fine German brew, a nice thick dark one, while the winter winds swept through that giant empty brewery and Meg warmed up a pot of our ongoing stew. We were like this odd couple grown somehow old before our time.

  As for sex together, or making love, like in Mexico I don’t remember it. Usually I remember sexual positions I get in with women so that I can play them back in my memory as a turn-on, but I don’t remember any from those early days with Meg. It must have been going on between us, but I don’t remember it. Night was always the time of warm snuggling while the radio played in the dark, after many beers, which relaxed me enough to allow me to fall into a childlike sleep, free of all desire.

  Next to Meg, beer was my best friend. I loved to look at it in the simple glass that I drank from. I loved the musty autumn smell of the hops as I lifted it to my nose. I loved the tickle of its foamy head as it left a white mustache on my upper lip, and the feeling of its smooth thickness going all the way down. Yes, it’s odd to say, but I have to admit it: I remember more how I made love to my beer than how I made love to Meg.

  There was another reason that Meg and I did not make love at night and that was our cat, Phil. We found Phil as a stray kitten in the hall of our building. Our friend Barney was working in the kitchen of Maxwell’s Plum, a fancy Upper East Side restaurant, and after work he used to bring over big plastic bags full of leftover meat which he’d hang on our doorknob. I had a great ongoing stew made from that meat. One morning I opened the door to find this sweet little emaciated tabby kitten crying and licking the bottom of the meat bag. We took him in and Meg named him after her brother who had died as a child of leukemia. So Phil grew up with us and actually slept between us at night, and stranger still, Phil slept on his back with his little paws over the edge of the blanket. The only thing that was missing was a pillow for his head. So on our first Christmas together, Meg made a little pillow for him. Phil was like our only child and we treated him that way.

  Our night rituals were clear and set. Everything felt in control. There were the beers and Phil, there was classical music on the little radio, there was Barney’s stew and hot baths in the kitchen. Whoever was not in the tub would read to the other from The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. It was a good life as lives go. It was a life of moderation and in-betweens. It was a settled, regular life.

  I was collecting Texas unemployment from the Alamo Theatre and lived off that as well as what I made from modeling. During the days I would walk. I would walk and walk. I would walk the city and get to know it that way. Walking was my therapy. Some days I would walk the whole length of Central Park, or just sit on a park bench and watch people and listen to them talk.

  Meg got a job selling postcards at the Metropolitan Museum gift shop and also made money by selling some of the rugs she had brought back from Mexico. When she wasn’t at work in the day she was doing her own artwork at home. She was getting into extremely dense charcoal drawings, which she called “landscapes,” although they were like no landscape I’d ever seen before. They were a foreign land to me and a home to her.

  Meg would start with a blank piece of white paper about two by three feet, and then lay a piece of masking tape across it like some artificial horizon. She’d proceed to fill in the whole piece of paper in gradations of charcoal. When she finished, she would tear away the masking tape to reveal startling white areas that were in such dramatic contrast against that black charcoal landscape.

  It was amazing to watch the way Meg worked, with the absolute focus of a pure obsession. I was witnessing a living, moving act of sublimation. She would take that piece of charcoal in her right hand and make endless little marks like streaks of black rain. She became that black rain. She could do it for hours. It was a beautiful world Meg created, a beautiful ordered world that reminded me of my favorite poem of Wallace Stevens, “The Idea of Order at Key West,” which has the line “Oh! Blessed rage for order.…” Meg had that rage for order and she created it wherever she went.

  This was when I was most deeply in love with Meg, when I would watch her go into these
drawing trances, these sketching fits, and I would be her sound track while she created her black rain. I would sit and slowly sip my dark German brews and tell her stories of all the people I’d seen and phrases I’d heard while on my daily walks. At the time it never occurred to me that I saw Meg as the woman Mom could’ve been, had Mom been able to complete art school and do something with it. Mom had dropped out of art school to marry Dad, and during her nervous breakdown she tried to get started again. She took painting classes, but she had a rough time because her concentration was so low and she kept slipping into the past.

  Now I was helping to create a space for Meg’s art to flourish, as if I were doing something my father had never done for my mother. It was a wonder and delight to me that Meg could find such passionate meaning in such strange and frivolous work. I secretly longed to find passionate meaning in my own life, but I couldn’t imagine what it would be. I had only the sad, soft, ancient legacy of the bog people, the old inheritance of the soft, pulpy Irish in me, telling stories while drinking beer.

  The stories I told Meg, the stories that came at the end of every day, were my art, my rage for order, my way of mastering the night, but I couldn’t see it at the time, because the words just disappeared. They never took a form I could look at. I would have had to write them down, and yet it never occurred to me at the time to do so. What did occur to me was that I wanted, or thought I wanted, to go back to acting. I liked Meg as an audience, but I also craved a larger one.

  So on my walks I began to buy the trade paper Back Stage and see what shows were being cast. I now was a member of Actors’ Equity and I had my Equity card; that much I had salvaged from the Alamo Theatre. So I’d check the paper and go to all these hopeless open-casting calls the out-of-work actors called “cattle calls.” I would show up and there would be all these other actors waiting who probably could have done the role just as well as I, or better, and I hated them. I fantasized about giving up on the whole art thing and sacrificing myself to help the needy—which made me think that I might be drawn to the less fortunate in a sick way. Maybe I could only live among sick people in order to feel well. I couldn’t be among normal, healthy people without feeling drained or stolen away by them, without feeling like I was disappearing. It really terrified me. I couldn’t take responsibility for these feelings and I would begin to get angry and blame them on Mom, on some failing in the way that she had raised me. This would be the darkest of paranoias. I would think Mom was like some sort of Medea who had killed her children, that somewhere along the line Mom had realized that if she couldn’t have her children for herself completely and forever, she was going to lay the groundwork for their self-destruction and then, after laying the groundwork, kill herself, just like in the Greek tragedies. Her children would be left with the curse, the fear of intimacy with other women. Because Mom was insatiable and couldn’t get enough intimacy from her family, she was going to make very sure that we couldn’t get it from someone else.

  Now I’m not saying that Mom did this consciously, but some dark unconscious shadow was operating through her, a shadow that she never came to recognize because of her constant search for the divine transcendent life. That shadow was a part of her, but she could not see it, because in Christian Science she was taught only to look for the light side, only look for the good.

  Those were dark times when I blamed Mom for my not being able to get closer to Meg or succeed in the theater. Then, just as I’d get swamped in all of that dark psychologizing, I’d try to pull out of it by getting a larger overview. I’d try to understand my failure in theater by taking a look at the plays they were casting. None of them really had to do with me. They were all so ethnic—you know, things like The Indian Wants the Bronx. Directors were always looking for courageous tough ethnic types, young antiheroes, not neurotic New England WASPs. They were all plays about tough ethnic guys bucking the system, not about people who disappeared when they came into a room of strangers.

  The big break came along out of nowhere. I read in Back Stage that Robert Lowell’s play Endecott and the Red Cross was being restaged at St. Clement’s Church. I had no idea what Endecott and the Red Cross was about. I assumed it was not about the guy who founded the American Red Cross but probably had to do with some dark Puritan heritage, of which Robert Lowell was still one of the great autobiographic voices. I loved Robert Lowell at a distance. I didn’t want to get too close because he represented that New England overbreeding which led to hypersensitivity and periodic madness, as well as wicked bouts with alcohol. He was a noble, beautiful man to look at, but deep in his writing I could feel him like an overbred Irish setter; nervous, quivering and shaking, constantly on the edge.

  Not only had Robert Lowell written the play, but he had chosen a man named John Hancock to direct it, and I thought: This is perfect. This play was made for me.

  And I was right. I went up for the audition and was immediately cast in the role of the King of the May. The play was based on a short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne called “The Maypole of Merry Mount,” which took place at the Merry Mount colony in Massachusetts and was basically about the punishment of the colonists for taking pleasure in the celebration of the pagan May Day festival. The whole colony was punished by a horrible oppressor named Endecott, who carried a flag with a red cross on it. In our first rehearsal, we all sat and listened to Robert Lowell read the play all the way through. He read in one long monotonous drone. Every character seemed to be speaking in the same depressive New England tones. He mumbled it through in a resigned way, with very little passion. I felt right at home. The play was all about my people, my repressive Puritan people.

  The Queen of the May was played by a beautiful blond actress, and I played the King, all dressed up in a fine white peasant shirt, long flowing auburn wig, rough brown leather pants, and high-laced suede boots. We looked great together, the Queen and I. She was dressed in pure white, with flowers in her hair. We got to dance around the maypole with some Puerto Rican actors who were playing American Indians and some other odd assorted colonial types. Then, right in the middle of our sensuous revels, we get busted by Endecott and his big red cross. The Queen and I get tied up and punished along with everyone else. And that was about it. It was like a “let’s pretend” backyard children’s game, only it was played in an Off-Broadway theater which doubled as a church on Sundays.

  But the experience of acting in that play did not, as I had hoped, lift me into some transcendent state. I hardly had any lines at all, and I felt like a prop. I wanted more out of theater, or I was going to give up on it and try to do something else, maybe become a poet even, if one could will such a thing.

  But as they say in show business, things lead to things, and indeed they did. At the opening-night cast party of Endecott, I met a weird and interesting theater director named Rex Duffy who took a liking to me. Rex was extremely dramatic-looking. He was very pale and angular, with a little goatee. He was about my age, but twice as intense and very passionate. He seemed to possess the male equivalent of Meg’s passion, and because of this I was immediately drawn to him. He was dressed completely in black—black pants, black shirt, black leather boots—and he smoked a filtered cigarette in a cigarette holder. He drank, I noticed, only straight Polish vodka. Most of all I was drawn to Rex’s mesmerizing stories about Bali and some crazy, unorthodox French actor named Antonin Artaud, who had gone there to study Balinese trance dance long before my uncle Jib went there to buy my monkey mask.

  The cast party was held around the maypole on the set of Endecott and suddenly I was back on that distant Rhode Island beach where Brewster the monkey boy had danced in front of Mom with the Balinese mask on. Robert Lowell had replaced Mom and was standing there like a great wise New England patrician in his tweed jacket and horn-rimmed glasses, palliating his shaky madness with tumblers of straight scotch. And Rex, in black, had replaced my uncle Jib, in white, telling wild island stories to an awestruck boy. I stood there between them having a déjà vu. I
stood there, this innocent Boy-King of the May, dreaming once again of Bali, that faraway other side of my cold dark New England heritage. I’d found my way to a lost trade route into a lost time.

  It was on that glorious night that Rex invited me to his experimental theater company, which he called the Rex Duffy Laboratory Theatre. I was ecstatic about what Rex told me at that party. His idea was that theater was action to heal the split between language and the body. He called the body “the flesh,” which at the time sounded even more exotic to me. I couldn’t get that word “flesh” out of my mind, as well as the word “heal.” And I thought that we were in the perfect place to talk of healing the flesh, here around the maypole at Merry Mount, where we had been punished for trying to celebrate the senses.

  Rex and I hit it off. I would almost say we bonded, which was rare for me because I had so few male friends. I was never attracted to real male men. But Rex had a nice blend of male and female in him and I was attracted to that quality. At the end of our conversation he invited me to come visit his theater.

  I showed up at Rex’s Laboratory Theatre early Monday morning. It was really just a hole in the wall in a basement room on West Nineteenth Street, no more than twenty-five by thirty feet, with one bare light bulb hanging from a very low ceiling.

  After a short coffee break and introductions to three very striking women and two less-than-striking men, the laboratory got down to work. Rex wanted to show me a run-through of an original theater piece they’d been rehearsing. It was called The Tower and it was based on the Tower of Babel story: how all humankind—who, at the time, spoke one language—tried to build a big tower tall enough to reach heaven and how God knocked the tower down and confounded their language and left them all alienated and speaking in many tongues.