by Allyson Bird
They had laughed and laughed.
“What is the subject of your question, Ali?”
Even her name offended him, short for Alice, with the same number of syllables, and pronounced ‘alley.’ She had been here forever.
Pierce went on typing. His plan was to meet the word count, let it rest, and see a show. He would come in early next day, freshen things up, and hand over the week’s reviews to the proofreader.
Ali Franco was wearing a shapeless gown of the 1970s, something his mother might have worn, a caftan or an afghan. Franco said she ‘collected’ them at flea markets and sometimes the thrift shop downstairs, information that made his skin crawl. Worse, she kept shifting the garment, folding and tucking and then resting in it like a Shar-Pei swaddled in flesh.
Franco said, “Seriously, my friend. Aren’t you embarrassed to write like that, at your age?”
Pierce raised his eyebrows. “‘Seriously?’ Aren’t you embarrassed to talk like that?”
She reeked of patchouli with an under-layer of something. Sweat? Ginger? It made him sneeze if she stood near him for too long.
“I write the way I write, Ali.”
Pierce decided to skip the performance he’d planned to see. Instead he would give this new company his attention. The invitation was both pretentious and last minute. The upstarts had the nerve to offer a guest-only preview, basically a dress rehearsal at which the actors would undoubtedly stumble over their lines. It was taking place in a warehouse down the street on the very night the card was delivered to his office. Ridiculous. He would go. The resulting profile of their incompetence might do them good.
“You don’t even like theatre any more, do you?”
Pierce swiveled in his chair to face Ali Franco. It was too much, the way she crept around challenging colleagues with her political stand against killing small things with big eyes, and her objection to microwaves and mammograms and some other ‘m’ thing. His chest burned with a desire to shout, “You’re being fired, you hag! Good luck getting another job at your age!”
No. He would shake her hand when the time came. It would be worth the wait to see the expression on her face as she marched her box of trinkets and her pictures of kittens and her spell-books down the hall to the stairs.
“Why would you say that?” Pierce asked. “Of course I like theatre, when it’s good. When it isn’t good it’s like watching someone cook and eat your intestines in front of you. Then having to write about it.”
“There are ways to write about it, without doing damage.”
“How would you know, Ali? Oh, sorry, I forgot. You wrote a couple of reviews back in the day, when it was just you and the publisher and the production manager keeping the lights on all night. You printed the paper yourselves and delivered it all over the city on your skateboards. What a time that must’ve been.”
“U-haul truck, not skateboards. We put together a good paper,” she said. “It was honest.”
“Then why don’t you like my reviews? I always tell the truth.”
Pierce went back to work. Franco simply didn’t understand his job. He couldn’t give people a pat on the back if they were delusional. There were too many untalented artists treading the boards. Someone had to weed out the weak. Even if Pierce had overlooked their shortcomings, Hurley wouldn’t stand for it. Hurley hated theatre, ranked it slightly above circus entertainment, the animal variety.
“Raise the bar on these fucking amateurs,” he said, at least once a month. “If I’m going to keep a goddamn theatre section in this paper, it better be entertaining.”
This is where Pierce always felt a pinch between his ribs. He had to steady himself. Any sign of fear and Hurley would chase him across the office, mocking his ungainly stride, knocking him to the floor, pinning him there and saying the one word that would destroy him. ‘Fired.’
Sometimes Pierce woke in the morning, shivering with sweat, the word stomping through his head. He would lie in the pale dawn while the city cast jagged shadows across the art deco building where he had lived for twelve years. He would stare at his five hundred square feet of hardwood floors and fluted glass door knobs, and wonder if this studio would be the place where he would die someday, alone, shrouded in Irish linen.
A weekly gutting of theatrical ego granted Pierce two thousand words on pages forty-three and forty-four of the print edition. He wasn’t about to let Ali Franco, or anyone else, interfere. Theatre magazines to which he’d once contributed lucrative features had gradually gone out of business. His day job was everything, financially speaking. Those two thousand words were all that separated Pierce from a world of illiterate bloggers, free-content hacks, and people who carried satchels containing sack lunches and the novels they were writing at the public library.
“You could get more people interested in seeing good work,” Ali Franco said. “You could encourage artists to practice and mature.”
He couldn’t believe she was still standing in his cubicle. Staring at him. Resting her hands on her hips, Akimbo Ali.
“Dear woman,” he said. “Everyone is interested in seeing good work. Most of the time, there isn’t any. What I see on the stage doesn’t please me. Since I have a degree in drama from one of the best universities in North America, I think it is safe to say that the work, rather than the critic, is—how do you say—‘not good.’”
“You’re jaded,” she said.
Beyond the eastern window the black sky grated against rooftops and chimneys. Clouds kept shifting, threatening more abuse.
“Why don’t you resign honorably, Pierce, while there’s still time? You could write whatever you feel. Just follow your heart.”
Franco’s husband had given up a successful career in engineering and retired to a beachfront shop where he painted orcas on pieces of driftwood and sold them to tourists. Ever since he’d been commissioned by the mayor’s office to create ‘an original driftwood,’ Franco had been urging all of her friends to quit their jobs and follow their hearts.
“My writing sells ads,” Pierce said. “Keeping this section of the paper open. Without my acumen and dedication these artists wouldn’t be properly reviewed. They would have only the enthusiasm of their friends, to gauge their competence. They would live and die without knowing if they have real talent.”
As if waiting for this moment, Franco unfolded a scrap of paper. She read out loud, “‘Astonishingly, in such a minor role, the porcine and barely audible Miss Mundy manages to ruin a production of Ibsen’s best known play.’”
“I knew it!” Pierce said. “You left that photo on my computer, didn’t you?”
Franco said nothing.
“I delivered a much needed antidote to an amateurish approach. They were a company of teenagers rehearsing in a garage. If an actor has talent and devotion to craft, he should make a commitment to a decent school.”
“For thirty or forty thousand dollars?” Franco asked. “Whatever happened to learning the basics and practicing?”
Arguing was pointless. The woman had to go. The paper’s intended demographic was twenty-five to forty. They didn’t need herbal tea concoctions, holistic flu remedies, and comforting advice from mom.
“You’re forty-six years old!” Franco shouted.
Pierce glanced up and down the row of cubicles. No one gophered; no one had the nerve.
“Forty-six,” Franco repeated. “And writing like a middle-school boy with a grudge.” She shook her head and walked away.
“Merciful fucking god,” Pierce muttered.
By seven o’clock his text had been revised and set aside. Pierce left the office happy to know the next day would be easier than this one. He turned up his collar and ventured across the street.
The nearest café buzzed with fluorescent light, sweating condensation under white awning, a bright bowl of murmuring customers at every hour. Arrivals announced by a tinkling bell attached to the glass door. Pierce decided an espresso would give him the boost he needed to survive new work by an unknown tro
upe with nothing to recommend them except an oddly compelling invitation.
The twin suns sink behind the lake…
He felt so tired, sometimes, and unappreciated.
After the debacle of his thesis Pierce had wanted very badly to stage his work, to prove his talent. He knew he would starve in New York or L.A., so he retired to his father’s house in the Pacific Northwest. Standards were so much lower there. He decided it would make a good launching pad for his plays. Eventually his success here would become so great, New York would come calling.
His father’s house was an impressive rambler spread across a hill with a view of Lake Union. Pierce was granted a small room with a private bath in the basement. There he wrote fiercely, madly, in his pajamas and t-shirts, for six years. A housekeeper left his meals on a tray outside the door. On rare occasions he had the run of the upstairs while his father took his trophy wife and children on vacations to Europe and the Caribbean.
Pierce wrote constantly. He seldom attended plays written by his contemporaries, or joined them in debates about the lack of funding and support for new work. Two or three examples of local playwriting confirmed his suspicion that his talent far exceeded their pitiable attempts. Their writing was derivative at best, hackneyed at worst. It was inexplicable how they continued to be produced. There were days, weeks, when the hunger to feel the raw sweetness of success left him jaundiced, sick and exhausted, unable to crawl out of bed, unable to face anyone.
Every theatre company in town rejected his plays, calling them ‘old fashioned’ and ‘over-written.’ Each new coffee date with an A.D. left him shaking, fighting back tears. He couldn’t bear to live this way, un-produced, insignificant, while so many people carried on perfectly well without knowing he existed. When he raised the idea of starting his own theatre with a substantial family loan his father disowned him, sent him packing with five hundred dollars and a bus pass. Pierce made the money last as long as possible, for the thought of menial labor made him swoon with nausea and panic.
This is when a former classmate, Gwen, appeared. Pounding one of her silk-gloved fists against his door at a fleabag motel on Aurora. Black suede pumps neatly sidestepping stray piles of underwear and newspapers. Pursing her lips at the sight of moldy pizza. Offering him a salary to write for a weekly paper.
“Because, darling, I’m moving back to New York where I fucking belong, and I promised my editor a decent replacement.” And her first five choices had turned her down flat.
Pierce would inherit her readership. He could decide on the shows he wanted to cover and the artists he would profile. In short, he was to take over the theatre section, increase its popularity by any means necessary, and make it pay for itself. This was, she warned, a hard sell. Few artists could afford advertising. Theatre people needed discounts, special deals, and trades. They came begging for a mention, however harsh. Pierce said yes, yes, and his career (which would span three editors and five budget cuts) began the following day.
The thing he couldn’t get over about the photo he’d seen was the young woman’s skin. The image had been glowing with internal light. Pierce knew better.
‘Porcine’ had taxed him. He recalled how he had longed to write, ‘pudgy’ or ‘bloated.’
Molly Mundy had come slouching into his cubicle on a Tuesday morning in the summer. She came bearing flyers and postcards—and a puppet, one she’d constructed for him, a puppet of him, with a blocky torso and a ghastly expression: tiny round mouth, raised eyebrows imploring, longing without hope. What kind of girl would craft such an awkward gift for a stranger?
She was no opalescent maiden or fairy lit from within. She was doughy and pockmarked. Her hair was uncombed, unwashed, a blunt cut ending at the jaw-line. Crunching bits of hard candy between unbleached yellow teeth. Her warmth was feral. Animal-like, she existed only in the moment, this infant who’d been coddled since birth. Her soft mouth was on a spree, munching a lemon drop and yammering about her boyfriend: a twenty-something prodigy from a family of writers and performers and the founder and A.D. of a theatre Pierce really ought to visit and consider reviewing if he wanted to find out what young people were doing all over the city in these tiny venues with no budget just building sets and sewing costumes and painting and rehearsing and selling tickets and really-really being alive in the way organic performance was meant to be instead of polished to the point of death…
“Tell you what,” Pierce had interrupted. “Why don’t I write a feature about your group? What is it called, again? Crude Motion?” He cringed inside. “Sounds like the sort of thing my editor-in-chief would love.”
That same night Molly Mundy had come to visit Pierce at home. She came bearing more gifts, photos of company members in sophomoric poses in makeshift costumes on bare stages with poor lighting.
“Excellent,” Pierce said. “These will help readers get a sense of who you are and what you do.”
She had come wearing a gossamer dress, empire waist with satin trim and silk wings. Ridiculous and needy as a child, she lingered in the doorway to his studio with her hands clasped in front of her. Giggling at his poster of Hamlet in pajamas. Gulping his wine. (“It has a weird little aftertaste.”) Breathlessly describing a ‘radically re-imagined’ production of Ibsen’s most frequently produced play. (“So people can really see it, really for the first time.”)
Pierce nodded and smiled. When the time was right, when her smile grew lazy and her words began to slur, he pulled Molly Mundy onto his lap and tugged her dress up around her waist. His eyes stayed with hers and she, fairy princess in love with her boy genius, let Pierce put his fingers inside her. The quick brightness in her eyes subsided. He shifted her weight and came without ever unbuttoning his trousers.
‘Porcine.’
Two weeks later he had summed up her turn as an elderly housekeeper with one perfect adjective. He knew it was perfect because he never heard from Molly Mundy again. He hoped his assessment of her stage presence had driven the untalented girl back to the trailer park where she belonged.
The boy genius A.D. had fired off a predictable email questioning Pierce and his capacity to judge organic, ephemeral art. Pierce had run out of energy and patience. He replied, simply, “Eat me.” Lowbrow yet effective, and the last time the company or its boy wonder had come to his attention.
He pushed open the door of the café. The place was teeming, thanks to the dreary weather. He was about to retreat when a woman in the far corner stood to clear her table. Pierce felt a pang of distress when he realized the woman was Ali Franco and she was crying.
Bastard, he thought. Hurley had done the deed after hours, fired his nemesis and said nothing, depriving Pierce of a pleasure he had anticipated for weeks.
Franco didn’t speak, only scooted around him with her face averted and exited the café. He draped his jacket over the chair to reserve the table.
The bell attached to the front door jingled, announcing more customers, this time a couple of Goths in black capes. They regarded the saved spot with disdain. Pierce had broken another unstated rule of the city by claiming a table before placing his order. He sighed with boredom and wondered what else the night would bring.
The Tatters Performance Group was supposed to reside in an abandoned warehouse between Pine and Pike. One of the few not yet claimed by developers.
Pierce walked from one corner to the other and back. Two streetlights facing one another across an alley were broken, making it difficult to read the numbers painted on the curb. On his fourth attempt he noticed a small, rain-marked poster taped to a metal door.
TPG
presents
Strange is the Night
Of course! It came to him at last. Chambers’ tantalizing mythos must be catnip to these people. When Pierce was in school Alfred Jarry had been all the rage. Now everyone was adapting Chambers’ fiction, usually without understanding it. Pierce smiled. The quiver in his stomach might have been joy or indigestion. It would be fun to teach the Tatters
Performance Group a lesson.
He pushed open the metal door. After a second the narrow lobby with its plush carpet and brass-plated ticket booth emerged from shadows. Behind the booth’s window a dour woman, round-faced and bespectacled, stared out at Pierce.
He noticed a couple of things: Aside from two old women consulting their programs there were no patrons milling about, always a bad sign at these invitation-only events; and his feet were sinking into the dense mush of gold carpeting. He approached the woman in the booth and said, “I’m here to review…”
She cut him off with a ticket stub and a greeting devoid of mirth or expression. “Thank you for joining us tonight, sir. We appreciate your patronage.”
Through the window she pushed a manila envelope with the word ‘Media’ printed in the same type as the sign on the front door. A glass of Pinot Grigio followed.
“Is the box office also the bar?” Pierce said.
“Only for special guests at special events, our finest private reserve,” said the woman in the booth. “Complimentary, of course. Enjoy the show.”
The carpet was so thick, so deep and spongy, Pierce had to lift his feet purposefully to make his way across the lobby. He felt as if he was goose-stepping but he had no choice. With each movement his feet sank heavily into the marshy substance.
“Strike one,” he murmured.
He sipped the wine, found it deliciously bright and tart. The two old women stood nearby, heads inclined together. As he passed them Pierce noticed each wore a pencil skirt with a cashmere sweater set, one in blue and one in violet, with matching brooches, a glittering arc of diamonds forming the letter ‘C’. He caught only stray threads of their conversation.
“There, you see, just as I said.”
“Cam, there was never a doubt.”
“Please.”
“I only argued there was no frisson if no one identifies with the goddamn protagonist.”
“Well, explain the effect of Kabuki, my dear.”
“You’re off topic. One identifies with a mask, a stereotype, if tradition prepares us for it. You’re obfuscating my original point.”
