"Lionel apologized?" Frances said. Without her glasses on, she gave him one of her naked looks. It was a way she had of avoiding seeing him while drilling straight through him. It made him feel damaged.
"You never went," she said. "You never went near that audition."
"Yes I did. I did go. That shit Lionel. Blew my whole day."
"Don't kid me. You didn't go. And Lionel's not a shit, he's been good to you. He gave you the uncle part in Navy Blues only three years ago. I don't know why you insist on forgetting that."
"It was junk. Garbage. I'm sick of being the geezer in the last act."
"Be realistic. You're not twenty-five."
"What's realistic is if they give me access to my range."
And so on. This was how they quarreled, and Matt was pained by it: it wasn't as if Frances didn't understand how much he hated sucking up to directors, waiting for the verdict on his thickening fleshy arms, his round stomach, his falsely grinning face, his posture, his walk, even his voice. His voice he knew passed muster: it was like a yo-yo, he could command it to tighten or stretch, to torque or lift. And still he had to submit to scrutiny, to judgment, to prejudice, to whim. He hated having to be obsequious, even when it took the form of jolliness, of ersatz collegiality. He hated lying. His nose was growing from all the lies he told Frances.
On the other hand, what was acting if not lying? A good actor is a good impostor. A consummate actor is a consummate deceiver. Or put it otherwise: an actor is someone who falls into the deeps of self-forgetfulness. Or still otherwise: an actor is a puppeteer, with himself as puppet.
Matt frequently held forth in these trite ways—mostly to himself. When it came to philosophy, he didn't fool anybody, he wasn't an original.
"You got a call," Frances said.
"Who?" Matt said.
"You won't like who. You won't want to do it, it doesn't fit your range."
"For crying out loud," Matt said. "Who was it?"
"Somebody from Ted Silkowitz's. It's something Ted Silkowitz is doing. You won't like it," she said again.
"Silkowitz," Matt groaned. "The guy's still in diapers. He's sucking his thumb. What's he want with me?"
"That's it. He wants you and nobody else."
"Cut it out, Frances."
"See what I mean? I know you, I knew you'd react like that. You won't want to do it. You'll find some reason."
She pulled a tissue from inside the sleeve of her sweater and began to breathe warm fog on her lenses. Then she rubbed them with the tissue. Matt was interested in bad eyesight—how it made people stand, the pitch of their shoulders and necks. It was the kind of problem he liked to get absorbed in. The stillness and also the movement. If acting was lying, it was at the same time mercilessly and mechanically truth-telling. Watching Frances push the earpieces of her glasses back into the thicket of her hair, Matt thought how pleasing that was, how quickly and artfully she did it. He could copy this motion exactly; he drew it with his tongue on the back of his teeth. If he looked hard enough, he could duplicate anything at all. Even his nostrils, even his genitals, had that power. His mind was mostly a secret kept from him—he couldn't run it, it ran him, but he was intimate with its nagging pushy heat.
"It's got something to do with Lear. Something about King Lear," Frances said. "But never mind, it's not for you. You wouldn't want to play a geezer."
"Lear? What d'you mean, Lear?"
"Something like that, I don't know. You're supposed to show up tomorrow morning. If you're interested," she added; he understood how sly she could be. "Eleven o'clock."
"Well, well," Matt said, "good thing I got my shoes shined." Not that he believed in miracles, but with Silkowitz anything was possible: the new breed, all sorts of surprises up their baby sleeves.
Silkowitz's building was off Eighth Avenue, up past the theater district. The neighborhood was all bars, interspersed with dark little slots of Greek luncheonettes; there was a sex shop on the corner. Matt, in suit and tie, waited for the elevator to take him to Silkowitz's office, on the fifth floor. It turned out to be a cramped two-room suite: a front cubicle for the receptionist, a boy who couldn't have been more than nineteen, and a rear cubicle for the director. The door to Silkowitz's office was shut.
"Give him a minute. He's on the phone," the boy said. "We've run into a little problem with the writer."
"The writer?" Matt said stupidly.
"She died last night. After we called you about the Lear thing."
"I thought the writer died a long time ago."
"Well, it's not that Lear."
"Matt Sorley," Silkowitz yelled. "Come on in, let's have a look. You're the incarnation of my dream—I'm a big fan, I love your work. Hey, all you need is a Panama hat."
The hat crack was annoying; it meant that Silkowitz was familiar mainly with one of Matt's roles on that television show—it was his signature idiosyncrasy to wear a hat in court until the judge reprimanded him and made him take it off.
Matt said, "The writer's dead? "
"We've got ourselves a tragedy. Heart attack. Two a.m., passed away in intensive care. Not that she's any sort of spring chicken. Marlene Miller-Weinstock, you know her?"
"So there's no play," Matt said; he was out of a job.
"Let me put it this way. There's no playwright, which is an entirely different thing."
"Never heard of her," Matt said.
"Right. Neither did I, until I got hold of this script. As far as I know she's written half a dozen novels. The kind that get published and then disappear. Never wrote a play before. Face it, novelists can't do plays anyhow."
"Oh, I don't know," Matt said. "Gorky, Sartre, Steinbeck. Galsworthy. Wilde." It came to him that Silkowitz had probably never read any of these old fellows from around the world. Not that Matt had either, but he was married to someone who had read them all.
"Right," Silkowitz conceded. "But you won't find MillerWeinstock on that list. The point is what I got from this woman is raw. Raw but full of bounce. A big look at things."
Silkowitz was cocky in a style that was new to Matt. Lionel, for all his arrogance, had an exaggerated courtly patience that ended by stretching out your misery; Lionel's shtick was to keep you in suspense. And Lionel had a comfortingly aging face, with a firm deep wadi slashed across his forehead, and a wen hidden in one eyebrow. Matt was used to Lionel—they were two old war horses, they knew what to expect from each other. But here was Silkowitz with his baby face—he didn't look a lot older than that boy out there—and his low-hung childishly small teeth under a bumpy tract of exposed fat gums: here was Silkowitz mysteriously dancing around a questionable script by someone freshly deceased. The new breed, they didn't wait out an apprenticeship, it was drama school at Yale and then the abrupt ascent into authority, reputation, buzz. The sureness of this man, sweatshirt and jeans, pendant dangling from the neck, a silver ring on his thumb, hair as sleek and flowing as a girl's—the whole thick torso glowing with power. Still a kid, Silkowitz was already on his way into Lionel's league: he could make things happen. Ten years from now the scruffy office would be just as scruffy, just as out of the way, though presumably more spacious; the boy out front would end up a Hollywood agent, or else head out for the stock exchange in a navy blazer with brass buttons. Lionel left you feeling heavy, superfluous, a bit of an impediment. This Silkowitz, an enthusiast, charged you up: Matt had the sensation of an electric wire going up his spine, probing and poking his vertebrae.
"Look, it's a shock," Silkowitz said. "I don't feel good about it, but the fact is I never met the woman. Today was supposed to be the day. Right this instant, actually. I figured first organize the geriatric ward, get the writer and the lead face to face. Well, no sweat, we've still got our lead."
"Lead," Matt said; but "geriatric," quip or not, left him sour.
"Right. The minute I set eyes on the script I knew you were the one. As a matter of fact," Silkowitz said, flashing a pair of clean pink palms, "I ran into Lionel the ot
her night and he put me on to you."
These two statements struck Matt as contradictory, but he kept his mouth shut. He had his own scenario, Silkowitz scouting for an old actor and Lionel coming up with Matt: "Call Sorley. Touchy guy, takes offense at the drop of a hat, but one hundred percent reliable. Learns his lines and shows up." Showing up being nine-tenths of talent.
Matt was businesslike. "So you intend to do the play without the writer."
"We don't need the writer. It's enough we've got the blueprint. As far as I'm concerned, theater's a director's medium."
Oh, portentous: Silkowitz as infant lecturer. And full of himself. If he could do without the writer, maybe he could do without the actor?
Silkowitz handed Matt an envelope. "Photocopy of the script," he said. "Take it home. Read it. I'll call you, you'll come in again, we'll talk."
Matt hefted the envelope. Thick, not encouraging. In a way Silkowitz was right about novelists doing plays. They overwrite, they put in a character's entire psychology, from birth on: a straitjacket for an actor. The actor's job is to figure out the part, to feel it out. Feather on feather, tentative, groping. The first thing Matt did was take a black marking pen and cross out all the stage directions. That left just the dialogue, and the dialogue made him moan: monologues, soliloquies, speeches. Oratory!
"Never mind," Frances said. "Why should you care? It's work, you wanted to work."
"It's not that the idea's so bad. Takes off from the real thing."
"So what's the problem?"
"I can't do it, that's the problem."
Naturally he couldn't do it. And he resented Silkowitz's demand that he trek all the way down to that sex-shop corner again—wasn't the telephone good enough? Silkowitz threw out the news that he couldn't proceed, he couldn't think, except in person: he was big on face to face. As if all that counted was his own temperament. With a touch of spite Matt was pleased to be ten minutes late.
A young woman was in the outer cubicle.
"He's waiting for you," she said. "He's finishing up his lunch."
Matt asked where the boy was.
Silkowitz licked a plastic spoon and heaved an empty yogurt cup into a wastebasket across the room. "Quit. Got a job as assistant stage manager in some Off Off. So, what d'you say?"
"The part's not for me. I could've told you this straight off on the phone. The character's ten years older than I am. Maybe fifteen."
"You've got plenty of time to grow a beard. It'll come in white."
"I don't know anything about the background here, it's not my milieu."
"The chance of a lifetime," Silkowitz argued. "Who gets to play Lear, for God's sake?"
Matt said heavily, bitterly, "Yeah. The Lear of Ellis Island. Just off the boat."
"That's the ticket," Silkowitz said. "Think of it as a history play."
Matt sat there while Silkowitz, with lit-up eyes, lectured. A history riff for sure. Fourth, fifth generation, steerage troubles long ago strained out of his blood—it was all a romance to little Teddy Silkowitz. Second Avenue down at Twelfth, the old Yiddish theater, the old feverish plays. Weeping on the stage, weeping in all the rows. Miller-Weinstock ("May she rest in peace," Silkowitz put in) was the daughter of one of those pioneer performers of greenhorn drama; the old man, believe it or not, was still alive at ninety-six, a living fossil, an actual breathing known-to-be-extinct duck-billed dodo. That's where she got it from—from being his daughter. Those novels she turned out, maybe they were second rate, who knows? Silkowitz didn't know—he'd scarcely looked at the handful of reviews she'd sent—and it didn't matter. What mattered was the heat that shot straight out of her script, like the heat smell of rusted radiators knocking in worn-out five-story tenements along Southern Boulevard in the thirties Bronx, or the whiff of summer ozone at the trolley-stop snarl at West Farms. It wasn't those Depression times that fired Silkowitz—it wasn't that sort of recapturing he was after. Matt was amazed—Matt who worshiped nuance, tendril, shadow, intimation, instinct, Matt who might jig for a shoemaker but delivered hints and shadings to the proscenium, Matt who despised exaggeration, caricature, going over the top, Matt for whom the stage was holy ground ... And what did little Teddy Silkowitz want?
"Reversal," Silkowitz said. "Time to change gears. The changing of the guard. Change, that's what! Where's the overtness, the overture, the passion, the emotion? For fifty, sixty years all we've had is mutters, muteness, tight lips, and, goddamn it, you can't hear their voices, all that Actors Studio blather, the old religion, so-called inwardness, a bunch of Quakers waiting for Inner Light—obsolete! Dying, dead, finished! Listen, Matt, I'm talking heat, muscle, human anguish. Where's the theatrical noise? The big speeches and declamations? All these anemic monosyllabic washed-out two-handers with their impotent little climaxes. Matt, let me tell you my idea, and I tell it with respect, because I'm in the presence of an old-timer, and I want you to know I know my place. But we're in a new era now, and someone's got to make that clear—" Silkowitz's kindling look moved all around, from desk to floor to ceiling; those hot eyes, it seemed to Matt, could scald the paint off the walls. "This is what I'm for. Take it seriously. My idea is to restore the old lost art of melodrama. People call it melodrama to put it down, but what it is is open feeling, you see what I mean? And the chance came out of the blue! From the daughter of the genuine article!"
Matt said roughly (his roughness surprised him), "You've got the wrong customer."
"Look before you leap, pal. Don't try to pin that nostalgia stuff on me. The youthful heart throbbing for grandpa's world. That's what you figure, right?"
"Not exactly," Matt fibbed.
"That's not it, honest to God. It's the largeness—big feelings, big cries. Outcries! The old Yiddish theater kept it up while it was dying out everywhere else. Killed by understatement. Killed by abbreviation, downplaying. Killed by sophistication, modernism, psychologizing, Stanislavsky, all those highbrow murderers of the Greek chorus, you see what I mean? The Yiddish Medea. The Yiddish Macbeth! Matt, it was big! "
"As far as I'm concerned," Matt said, "the key word here is old-timer."
"There aren't many of your type around," Silkowitz admitted. "Look, I'm saying I really want you to do this thing. The part's yours."
"A replay of the old country, that's my type? I was doing Eugene O'Neill before you were born."
"You've read the script, it's in regular English. American as apple pie. Lear on the Lower East Side! We can make that the Upper West Side. And those daughters—I've got some great women in mind. We can update everything, we can do what we want."
"Yeah, we don't have the writer to kick around." Matt looked down at his trouser cuffs. They were beginning to fray at the crease; he needed a new suit. "I'm not connected to any of that. My mother's father came from Turkey and spoke Ladino."
"A Spanish grandee, no kidding. I didn't realize. You look—"
"I know how I look," Matt broke in. "A retired pants presser." He wanted to play Ibsen, he wanted to play Shaw! Henry Higgins with Eliza. Something grand, aloof, cynical; he could do Brit talk beautifully.
Silkowitz pushed on. "Lionel says he's pretty sure you're free."
Free. The last time Matt was on a stage (televison didn't count) was in Lionel's own junk play, a London import, where Matt, as the beloved missing uncle, turned up just before the final curtain. That was more than three years ago; by now four.
"I'll give it some thought," Matt said.
"It's a deal. Start growing the beard. There's only one thing. A bit of homework you need to do."
"Don't worry," Matt said, "I know how the plot goes. Regan and Goneril and Cordelia. I read it in high school."
But it wasn't Shakespeare Silkowitz had in mind: it was Eli Miller the nonagenarian. Silkowitz had the old fellow's address at a "senior residence." Probably the daughter had mentioned its name, and Silkowitz had ordered his underling—the boy, or maybe the girl—to look it up. It was called the Home for the Elderly Children of I
srael, and it was up near the Cloisters.
"Those places give me the creeps," Matt complained to Frances. "The smell of pee and the zombie stare."
"It doesn't have to be like that. They have activities and things. They have social directors. At that age maybe they go for blue material, you never know."
"Sure," Matt said. "The borscht belt up from the dead and unbuckled. You better come with me."
"What's the point of that? Silkowitz wants you to get the feel of the old days. In Tulsa we didn't have the old days."
"Suppose the guy doesn't speak English? I mean just in case. Then I'm helpless."
So Frances went along; Tulsa notwithstanding, she knew some attenuated strands of household Yiddish. She was a demon at languages anyhow; she liked to speckle her tougher crosswords with cri de coeur, Mitleid, situación difícil. She had once studied ancient Greek and Sanskrit.
A mild January had turned venomous. The air slammed their foreheads like a frozen truncheon. Bundled in their down coats, they waited for a bus. Icicles hung from its undercarriage, dripping black sludge. The long trip through afternoon dark took them to what seemed like a promontory; standing in the driveway of the Home for the Elderly Children of Israel, they felt like a pair of hawks surveying rivers and roads and inch-tall buildings. "The Magic Mountain," Frances muttered as they left the reception desk and headed down the corridor to room 1-A: Eli Miller's digs.
No one was there.
"Let's trespass," Frances said. Matt followed her in. The place was overheated; in two minutes he had gone from chill to sweat. He was glad Frances had come. At times she was capable of an unexpected aggressiveness. He saw it now and then as she worked at her grids, her lists of synonyms, her trickster definitions. Her hidden life inside those little squares gave off an electric ferocity. She was prowling all around 1-A as if it was one of her boxes waiting to be solved. The room was cryptic enough: what was it like to be so circumscribed—a single dresser crowded with tubes and medications, a sagging armchair upholstered in balding plush, a bed for dry bones—knowing it to be your last stop before the grave? The bed looked more like a banquet table, very high, with fat carved legs; it was covered all over with a sort of wrinkly cloak, heavy maroon velvet tasseled at the corners—a royal drapery that might have been snatched from the boudoir of a noblewoman of the Tsar's court. A child's footstool stood at the bedside.
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