The Girl of the Lake

by Bill Roorbach

  “Tamara, wait. You’re talking schedule?” Marcia said, unable to hide her own panic. “Who’s going to play fucking Lear?”

  “Lear is right in front of us,” Tamara Keith said calmly and, unveiling her carefully planned surprise, pointed to Miller Malloy.

  The company burst into agitated conversation.

  “No thanks,” Miller said, proper measures of wryness and respect, but firm: “No way.”

  But Tamara wasn’t kidding. “Run-through,” she shouted.

  “But wait,” Miller said.

  “You know the lines,” Tamara said. “You know them very well. Just say them, be Lear. Don’t act. Muss that fabulous hair.”

  “Don’t act?” Miller said.

  “Don’t act,” Tamara said again.

  “Holy shit,” someone said.

  “Jack will turn up,” Miller said as the makeup woman tousled his hair and dirtied his face. The costumer threw John Postlewaite’s ragged greatcoat around Miller’s shoulders. And then Miller was onstage as King Lear, a stumbling performance. The new Kent, at least, was passable.

  After lunch was not just off-book, it was full dress, props, and lights. After a hastily prepared and scarfed dinner, more so, including an audience: cast families, two college classes, and media in the house, reviewers for three local papers and the Boston Globe. The Times wouldn’t come till opening night, thank goodness.

  “Use real emotion,” Tamara said to Miller Malloy, special session.

  “Breathe,” the stage manager said contemptuously.

  And Miller realized he was not.

  “Real despair,” Tamara said again.

  The stage manager clacked her tongue: Miller Malloy was no actor.

  Miller breathed and recalled deeply the days after Lou had passed, recalled and replayed his own brush with madness.

  “You’re useless now,” Tamara said. “A useless, powerless old man.”

  Useless! Powerless!

  “Here’s your last chance to have any control. Doubtful it will work. Some king you turned out to be.”

  Last chance!

  Marcia appeared and patted his back, even she seeming to lack confidence in him. “I love you, Miller Malloy,” she said.

  Surely she was false.

  The useless man recalled his lines flawlessly, but his Lear though much improved for the dress was too diffident, was too much like Miller: ingratiating, respectful. Tamara Keith sat him down and they talked past midnight. “It’s all inside you,” she said. “Every bit. These fuckers around you, they hate you, they have cursed you, they are plotting against you. Only Cordelia is true, and you’ve mucked that up, haven’t you, you old fool. Kent, too, your one true friend. Banished? What were you thinking? Where does this awful abuse come from? You’ve ruined everything. Your kingdom is gone. Face it. Howl for me. Howl for me now.” She gripped his shoulders and shook him.

  Miller howled, howled from his feet, through his guts, up into his chest, out his open mouth. He pushed his coach away, howled louder yet, rage blotting his eyes.

  “Break a leg,” Tamara said. “Break everyone’s leg. And for God’s sake, sleep late.”

  CURTAIN CAME INEXORABLY. THE stage manager called “Thirty minutes!” through the dressing room intercom and then, eternally later, “We’ve got a full house. Five minutes!”

  Miller’s heart was not exactly in his throat—as CEO of a large company he’d been on bigger stages any number of times and in hairier situations countless, speaking both scripted and unscripted. The difference now was that Lou was dead, and worse than that, he really was useless, mourning he’d never fully processed, self-abnegation he’d begun to feel and never articulated and never named: useless, a useless man. How he hated Tamara Keith! How he hated them all!

  He made a grand but shuffling entrance, the weight of England upon him. He said, “Attend the Lords of France and Burgundy.” Or Lear said it. Lear said it neither loud nor soft, and with a touch of anger that hadn’t occurred to Miller before, and volumes of sadness, same, and shame, and helplessness. The house was dead silent as he explained the division of his kingdom, as his elder daughters gave their duplicitous speeches, and as Cordelia gave her fatal but honest one. Someone in the audience shouted “No!” when Lear disinherited her.

  Miller, for his part, felt that a fog bank had drifted in and surrounded him, a fog that only slowly lifted, then cleared suddenly at the moment that Kent returned to the play. Loyal Kent, whom mad Lear had banished, returning disguised as Caius. But it wasn’t the callow Yale kid playing the role. It was Jack Dance. Jack Dance was back, and Jack was Kent. He reeked of gin, of restless nights, of days in a car, of bad coffee, worse food, desultory rage. In his bleary eyes was adrenaline, and something more: white powder still dusted the edges of his nostrils. The dressers had slapped his face with mud makeup. His dress was Lear’s, however, a bad sign: he’d dressed as Lear, the narcissistic fuck.

  Miller found that he could breathe again, that he was firmly onstage, that he was both in his character and in the room with four hundred others, a task to perform, a person to take care of. Jack Dance as Kent as Caius was his ready servant, loving, warm, magnanimous, tinge of fury, and the scene went well. Backstage, however, Jack would communicate with no one, wary and unhappy and tense—his prep, Miller supposed, feeling thoroughly dissed. But it wasn’t like Miller wanted any conversation either.

  They stayed separate, worlds apart.

  Onstage, Jack’s tightly stuffed emotions rose in total control, and he was electric, absolute dynamite, everyone would later agree. Miller felt the power of what was between their characters—loyalty, love, misprision. Sir John’s example, Jack’s booze-fueled skill, Tamara’s manipulations, all of it made Miller a great actor, too. He absorbed the power of what was between Jack and him, then breathed it out, unequal, undiscussed: competition, miscommunication, hatred even, hatred that it was hard to admit flowed both ways. The audience felt all of it, too—when Kent confessed that he was Caius, that same voice out there shouted, “Forgive!”

  The evening proceeded, inexorably, Miller never so alive.

  Credulous Edmund was killed duly by his duplicitous half brother, Edgar, even as Regan and Goneril died tangled in their own plots.

  Then it was time for Lear’s last entrance. Backstage, the busy (and now very respectful) stage manager and two burly stage hands arranged the tiny Russian playing Cordelia, arranged her dead on Lear’s shoulder and held her weight for him till the moment of his entrance—there wasn’t much to her, but it was plenty for Miller. When he stepped onstage that broad stagger was real.

  And now for Lear’s last lines, which seemed to reside somewhere down in Miller’s boots, a deep reach, anyway. “Howl! Howl! Howl!” He’d learned how to say this by watching John Postlewaite, learned how to feel it from Tamara, believed in it now, a low, keening, measured howl contained in its own name, not quite allowed past the word, times three.

  Cordelia was dead.

  Miller felt it profoundly.

  Loyal Kent picked up the knife that had taken her life, still dripping with pretend blood (those capsules were amazing), an old and ornate hunting knife Miller himself had found in a junk shop near Quechee, quite real. Jack as Kent contemplated the blade, weighed it in two hands, stage business they hadn’t rehearsed ever, but of course they hadn’t rehearsed together, Jack and Miller, and there was always room for improvisation, especially with the audience absolutely riveted, silent in their seats, not a cough, not a creak. Together, Jack and Miller added a few extra beats, a breathtaking moment that would be discussed for decades to come, and not only at Rocky Pond.

  It was time for Lear to die. The company, of course, had often gotten this far in rehearsal, two full weeks. And Miller had watched them, coached them, helped John Postlewaite remember what play he was in. But Miller himself had never gotten this far as Lear. Thanks, however, to Honey Park, he knew how to die. Very much in the moment, in a different man’s very different body, Mill
er coughed, dropped to his knees on the proscenium, then slumped sideways till his cheek hit the boards. He patted the stage forlornly (that would be discussed as well, the genius of that demonstration of the king’s connection to his land), closed his eyes, rolled onto his back as Postlewaite had done.

  “He faints!” cried the perfidious Edgar, a great young actor from Ireland.

  Kent leapt to Lear, practically a martial arts move, Jack a very physical actor. He cried, “Break heart. I prithee, break!” And fell upon Lear, heart indeed broken, off-script, the entire cast taken by surprise.

  Miller felt the tip of the hunting knife under his solar plexus, at first merely uncomfortable—what was Jack Dance doing?—then painful. And then worse, he thought he felt it slide into him, first a pressure, then a blinding pain and shock in all his organs, which convulsed inside him, a collapsing kind of sudden cramp, a piercing heat up under his ribs from below, an odd and final feeling of mortification, so many watching, the pounding weight of his heart giving way like an overwhelmed dam. Jack let Miller go, withdrew the weapon, and then, eye-to-eye, kissed him on the forehead, the scene as perhaps it should have been written.

  The actor playing Edgar knew something had gone amiss but, unsure what, said his line: “Look up, my lord.” He saw the blood then, the wound in Lear’s thin gown, pulled Jack away from Miller Malloy in horror: he knew what capsule blood looked like, smelled like.

  Even as Jack said his own line, exquisite desperation: “Vex not his ghost!”

  “He is gone, indeed,” Edgar said automatically, confused (later he’d mention the iron smell of Miller’s blood), then, coming to his wits, cried, “A doctor!”

  Albany, oblivious, finished his line, all the way to the “gor’d state,” didn’t understand why Edgar was tussling with Kent. But then he, too, got it—so much to understand in that split second—smelled the very real blood and the real smell of opened organs, leapt to Miller, his instinct to staunch the wound, got his own hands bathed in blood. Poor dead Cordelia caught on and opened an eye, then both, then leapt to her feet and screamed. From the audience it looked like a crazily interesting and surely controversial variation of the play was in progress till Albany shouted, “Nine-one-one! Someone call nine-one-one!”

  Jack was the only one to keep his cool. He cheated toward the audience, fending Edgar off with one arm, and delivered the last line of his career: “I have a journey, sir, shortly to go; / My master calls me, I must not say no.”

  Then he shoved Edgar to the stage (that poor Irish kid, forever to be traumatized), bolted out of the back of the theater and into the blue rental car the police would later find on the verge of one of the dirt roads along the Canadian border—loyal Kent, never to be seen again, never to be caught, never to be punished, though the unidentified remains of men are often discovered in those woods, years, sometimes decades, after whatever violence has befallen them.

  NO WORDS WOULD COME to Miller, though he moved his lips expressively, no cry of pain though he was nothing but pain, no further howling though he felt a bellowing inside him, a roaring that rose up from his very genius (as Shakespeare called the soul), only a feeble “Lou” emerging, and repeated, and then a vision: her face, her loving, deepening, all-consuming gaze, and finally a kiss, a juicy naked kiss, a kiss from those first heady days of love, something eternal lodged within it, the last tactile moment of Miller’s life.

  Some Should

  A LAMB IS BORN. The mother is Cindy, a Katahdin hair sheep of some distinction, one of the older gals, not a nurture natural, never was. I believe in the Andean idea that women are better at lambing time, that being a woman myself there’s a way I feel everything my ewes go through. Anyway, I don’t judge Cindy. I just get to work. Which means rising at three thirty to try to help with the new one, lick it clean with a wet towel first rubbed on Cindy, then put its questing mouth to the teat. But still the ewe isn’t into it, kicking the babe away repeatedly. In the end I tie the new mom to a section of fence so she can’t get away. Only takes a dawn and a day to make a bond, and Cindy’s always been like that, gets into it eventually, even turns fiercely protective, as if compensating for the late onset of instinct. So I have some confidence. My date will not have to be postponed:

  A priest.

  Or, anyway, in his profile pic he’s wearing one of those white tabs in his collar. He says in his bio that he’s a widower, says he’s looking for a change. He loves to hike, a plus. He loves to travel, same. He’s a gardener, plus ten. He speaks French fluently. (I speak Spanish—together we can go places.) He was on two dating sites, one snuggly, the other filthy, but then, so was I. His eyes are almost black in the photo, which looks official, the one you’d send to the newspaper, eyebrows heavy, salt-and-pepper hair. No way, I thought, first time I saw him, but later put my thumb over his neck, trying to see him without the collar. And then, worse, I cut a flannel shirt out of an Eddie Bauer catalog, intricate, teeny work with the scissors, and tried it on him: sexy.

  And now I’m in my Toyota Tundra, heading down to Ann Arbor, more than an hour’s drive, two bales of hay and a broken spreader in the back. My priest will have seen my snuggly photo, which is fairly honest: pretty-enough me with the skeptical look in my eyes, jeans and a sweater, hoe in hand, bare feet. He won’t mind that I’m thirty-three (my year to be crucified), hopefully hasn’t cut out a nun’s habit and wimple to stick on me. Or maybe that’s the Catholics. This one’s Episcopalian—a little explanation right in the profile, both sites. I keep going back to look at his photo: he’s kind and decent and strong, you can tell, or maybe you can’t tell, not a pushover, anyway, not quite a goody-goody, something in his eyes. Also kindness. My own self-delusion, no doubt. Nothing to do with the fact that he’s extremely handsome. But he’s been so frank!

  Well, I’ve been frank, too, the only farmer on HotLava as far as I can see, certainly the only one with a bikini shot: see what hard work can do for the abs? I’m a babe, let’s face it. At least I think so when I don’t think the opposite, which is pretty much all the time. Dirt under the nails, arms covered in barbed-wire scratches, sunburned cheeks, pale forehead. My bio isn’t as complete as his, but I’ll give him the rest tonight: after lambs and a fairly successful allium stand at the Saturday farmers’ market way up in Traverse City (garlic, onions, shallots, leeks, ornamentals), my business is organic vegetable seeds in a pretty narrow range for the International Seed Project. I keep a very sweet pair of work mules (Butch and Jim), also a flock of layers. Another thing about me: I’ll drive an hour and a half for a blind date.

  With a priest.

  HURON RIVER KITCHEN I haven’t been to before, though I’ve heard of it—expensive, farm to table. I approve. Most of the dates I’ve met so far have picked, like, Applebee’s, and those were the good ones. The way this web thing is done is you meet outside whatever restaurant or maybe at the bar (if the place has a bar, fucking teetotalers), chat a minute either way, car keys in hand, just to make sure there’s a good bailout point.

  My priest suggested a coffee shop at first, but some more daring part of me emailed back that we would want alcohol. He didn’t mind a glass of wine, he said. Or didn’t say, exactly—this was all email. You’re supposed to go dutch, but he said if I couldn’t afford the place he’d happily pay. I didn’t know how I felt about his paying. I didn’t know about the insistence on wine. In mind of his profession, I’d dressed modestly, but then, also in mind of his profession, I’d changed, a really good new bra under a short dress in bold fields of color, satiny breeze of a thing I’d found in Traverse just that last week, couple of dabs of my new perfume (Long-Term Relationship by Lanvin, ha) where some part of me hoped his nose would go.

  The good father was waiting patiently near the hostess station, gorgeous. Just as in his photo. Like any layperson, he took in my legs first. But he was better than most at keeping my eye after that, didn’t linger over the bra situation. I’d have to check on that.

  He’d expected a farmer.


  We shook hands. Mine was rough. His was soft. “You’re wearing your collar?” I said.

  “I wanted my cards on the table, is all,” he said meekly. We were still shaking hands.

  “You planned that line,” I said.

  He laughed: yes he had.

  “But the collar actually hides your cards, doesn’t it,” I said.

  Now he did look at my chest, leisurely. I mean my bra. I’m all freckles down in there and it makes a pretty attractive package, strong shoulders. Titties first for the gold, as Coach Sandra used to say, talking posture. Equestrian team. Play to your strengths, she also said. And did eventually teach me that I was a package of strengths. A counter to my mom, who focused on flaws, made me feel like a package of shit. And to my dad, barely present, yet my hero for life, just for being positive. The kind of stuff you do not under any circumstances talk about on dates. Did my priest like my bra or not?

  “This place, it’s a little overly beautiful,” I said.

  “I’ve made a reservation,” he said. He’d missed a spot shaving and his beard was coming in grayer than the hair on his temples, which he’d barely combed, not a vain person, I surmised, and more than a little weary looking, no predator. The trendy dining room was crowded and already bustling, and on a Tuesday night. I’m tall but he was taller. I’m zaftig where he was more trim. It’s not every Internet date that wants me the way he did. This kind of thing you can figure out in the first seconds of an interaction, of course. It lay behind his gentleness like a fire behind an ornate grate, flowers and hummingbirds in filigree, lovingly designed and cast but too hot to touch. He was very high scoring on the first-impression meter, is what I’m trying to say. Plus he’d gotten nervous, while I’d relaxed. He kept trying to stand up straighter; I cocked a satin hip and slouched. I mean, all of this in less than a minute. The hostess came our way, a pencil with breasts.

  My priest turned quizzically to me, not so much as a hello for her. For him, I was the only woman in the room. More points for the Episcopalians. The hostess said she was Caroline and did we have reservations, a perfectly nice person who had come under my guns. Contrite, I said, “Yes, we do. But we’ll sit at the bar here and have a drink first, okay?”