The Daredevils

by Gary Amdahl

  As Charles made his ridiculous departure that day, he saw, thought he saw, Vera push her face through the greasy red drapery and then withdraw it. Perhaps he had seen it in the corner of his eye—the sudden absence. He could feel her every moment across all time and space, no? He was in love with her, no? Love was not thinking about love, it was not about lolling about in feelings of love, it was apprehending the movements of the loved one across all time and space.

  She knew more than a little about Charles, and about his family—not simply because she was the hostess of a salon and a terminal of radical gossip but because they were a family about whom things necessarily were known. The desire of the people of San Francisco to have knowledge of the Minots was somehow virtuous—because they were in so many easily demonstrable ways so admirable and so detestable. And the release of knowledge from the family, too, seemed virtuous: We belong to our city, they seemed to admit and proclaim at the same time, to our state, to our country, our God. Playing dumb, sometimes just for the derisive fun of it, sometimes to draw out an unsuspecting and perhaps valuable speaker, was something she did frequently and too easily; she disliked the occasional arrogant nastiness and fundamental lawyer-like deception of it but also could not help but be fascinated by the newly visible person she saw, or thought she saw, blinking uncertainly but hopefully, where the opaque and therefore hostile stranger had been standing. This was especially the case, it turned out, with Charles, whom she was afraid she was prepared to like, despite his wealth, because he was admirable—and because, she was also afraid, he had a target painted on his back.

  Taking his feelings as genuine, primary, and direct responses to recent, incontrovertible acts, and noting that all action was incontrovertible and therefore worthy of the most intensely rigorous scrutiny, Charles decided to invite Vera out for an afternoon at the Sutro Baths, on the ocean side of the peninsula. This was an extravagance of engineering in which seven tanks were flushed and filled daily by the tide, several of them heated for the purposes of relaxation, one filled with fresh water: two acres of swimming, diving, and bathing pools within a luminous structure—even on the bleakest and grayest of days—of glass and black iron that could accommodate fifty thousand swimming, eating, drinking, smoking, waltzing, and promenading people.

  Vera said that she was familiar with the place: her friends had taken her there after a particular grim and grimy year.

  They had taken the lift down from the sidewalk and were staring into the gloom of the basement beneath the motorcycle shop. After a moment Vera stepped across the threshold of metal and cement and motioned for Charles to follow as she opened a door and made her way through a damp dripping space redolent of burnt oil and mildew and gasoline, navigating almost purely by memory between piles of junk and frames of motorcycles like skeletons and disassembled engines with parts spread around them on greasy cloths, all shapeless masses shifting in the dark, until she came to a second door, on which she used a key, selected in darkness and fitted to its lock as surely as if it had been broad daylight. She entered the room and with a long, measured sigh, lit an oil lamp.

  A printing press took up most of the room. She took a sheet from the press tray and brought it near the lamp. A cartoonist using pen and ink had drawn a doctor handing a rich woman with a single child a packet of birth control information with one hand, while waving away, with the other hand, behind his back, a poor woman with six or seven children. The caption read: THE BOSS’S WIFE CAN BUY INFORMATION TO LIMIT HER FAMILY AND THE BOSS CAN BUY YOUR CHILDREN TO FILL HIS FACTORIES WITH CHEAP LABOR. She moved to the washstand, glanced at herself in a tiny oval mirror with an ornate grillwork of vines and leaves framing it; then at the old printed slogan:

  NO GODS TO FEAR

  NO MASTERS TO APPEASE

  NO DOGMAS TO RECITE

  She stood for a moment staring blankly at it, then back at herself in the little mirror. Some breathlessly unmeasured time later, Charles watched Vera and Vera’s reflection as she poured water from the jug into the bowl. She splashed her face and neck and arms and dried herself with a snow-gray towel. With the raspy cloth still to her face, she appeared to remember that she’d not locked the doors behind her. She hung the towel on its hook and turned to the door, where a man strange to Charles now stood.

  He looked shy and arrogant on the shadowy threshold, a tender bully. Looking over Vera’s shoulder at Charles he said, “I’m sure not that sleek asshole they call ‘the American.’ In fact, I look like a rat. But I’m not. And I do have whiskey and cigarettes.” It took Vera only seconds to recover herself. “I like to drink,” she said. “And I like to fuck.”

  His name was Warren Farnsworth and they had been lovers for some time, but it was understood that the room in the basement was a private, nearly secret place, where he was not, where no one, was welcome. “That’s terrific,” he said, stepping from the murky shadow into the yellow light. She saw where his dirty suit had been ripped, and fingered it. “Knifework,” he said. “Fraction of an inch.” He took hold of her fingers and held them for a moment. Then it became clear that he was struggling not to sob, and failing. He made several noises that were more like barks than anything else and his face was wet with tears. “I wouldn’t have come down here if I wasn’t at the end of my fucking rope,” he whimpered. “Get him the fuck out of here, please.” She held his head to her breast and then it was over. Warren was embarrassed and turned away. Charles excused himself and made his way back to the lift.

  Vera saw Warren was very tired. It took him a long time to slip the coat off. By the time he’d hung it on the nail in the wall, she was naked and under the covers of the little bed. She was looking at the coat, glancing at him, and returning her gaze to the coat.

  She thought its folds were as rich with texture and shadow as any Renaissance drapery or cloak, and that he was in every way a superior man—a storm of disgust for the wealth and privilege she normally held in prodigious equanimity had blown up out of a clear sky—to Charles Minot.

  But in the wake of the storm: greasy gray pity. She did not enjoy the sex. It was in fact, she realized, the last time she would sleep with him.

  Rehearsals the next day were devoted to blocking, to choreography, to the apparently essential movements of persons and things around the stage by means of a timing that was a subset of real time but which required its own very specific measurement, and the marking with chalk of certain apparently important spots on the boards where whatever might be said or done must be said and done. It was a different but equally real space and time. But because he mistrusted plans so fundamentally, preferring and hoping—Sir Edwin whispering narcotically into his ear and in his dreams—for a kind of improvised dance instead, he introduced a set of exercises that Sir Edwin had grouped under the heading, THE SHOWING OF HEAVENLY EFFECTS IN EARTHLY ACTORS. He also sometimes referred to them as “Colombian Hypnosis,” as he had first seen it practiced at the opera house in Bogota. The purpose of the exercises was to prepare them for what would happen in performance, night after night: they would arrive at the proper place at the proper time, but it would be unfamiliar. Everything would seem to have changed, irrevocably and without a trace of the old and familiar, the chalked X marking the spot of the remembered thing. And so they worked muscles that would relieve them of the pain caused by the tension of being a stranger in a strange land, of living with what Sir Edwin rather awkwardly, in a very brief and incoherent pre-rehearsal speech—the offering of notes—called “the mental illusion of things that aren’t really there.”

  They described circles in the air before them with their left hands, stopped, described crosses with their right hands, stopped, then attempted both at once.

  They described circles with their left feet in the chalky dust of the boards and wrote their names in the air with their right.

  It was difficult, Charles admitted over the murmuring and sputtered laughter, but not impossible. There was nothing in the body that forbade or prevented these movements. One
of his university friends, a chubby red-faced young man who liked to wear short, wide colorful ties, Ted Blair, who could just barely resist Charles’s authority—as most of the others could not—cried out, imitating a Shakespearean declaimer, wanting to know what was it, then, for God’s sake?

  The theater smelled strongly of sawn lumber and hot metal and everyone smelled and liked it. There was a haze of sawdust and perhaps the memory of smoke in the air, faint, but thick enough to soften the surfaces of things. They were at once omnipotent and unable to act. And knew it. Hated it, the bizarre license and even more bizarre freedom, and did not understand it, their incapacity in the face of it all, but knew it, and continued to mutter and chuckle. The echo of Teddy’s voice faded into the darkness of the balcony.

  “What is it indeed?” stage-whispered Sir Edwin from the darkness.

  Charles and Vera faced each other, not quite close enough for an embrace, but close enough for shapes and features to sharpen and brighten. Then they became isolated and vivid. He held up his left hand, she, at nearly the same moment, her right. They began, gently and tentatively, staring into each other’s eyes, to follow the movement of their hands.

  The rest of the company paired off and did the same, some only just then realizing how thick the haze was, and how terrifying the memory. Someone said there would always be a fire burning in this theater. No one replied. Vera pressed her hand forward, and Charles pulled his back. He lifted his left knee, she her right. They continued these simple discrete movements for a while, then began to combine them, lifting an arm and drawing back and lifting a foot, as if cocking it to kick, balancing on the planted foot, drawing the arm down sinuously, as if wiping steam slowly from a mirror.

  Vera slowly stretched her neck and moved her face toward Charles’s. He drew his head back, doubling his chin. When she curved her spine toward him, he arched his backward.

  The movements of limbs and torsos and heads and even features of faces became stranger and more difficult to follow. Vera and Charles dropped to the floor on hands and knees, maintaining, trying to maintain, the exact relation of face to face, trying to match nearly indiscernible twitches, flares, curls of eyebrow, nostril, lip.

  They rose into a bobbing crouch, and their movements became grotesque. At first the grotesquerie was merely odd, but quickly became stylized, as if that had been the purpose—which, Charles noted with dismay, it had most emphatically not been.

  Breathing became an essential part of what was now an amusement.

  The respiration of the whole company became pronounced, then exaggerated, filling the theater with roaring and hissing. The acts became ridiculously theatrical: crucifixion, ravishment, courtship, buying, selling, courtship, submission, grandeur.

  It was as if the company had stumbled on Delsarte.

  Charles suddenly, without the least somatic warning or hinting glint in his eye to Vera, stopped and stood and clapped his hands once, sharply, loud as he could.

  CRACK!

  Vera scrambled to her feet and visibly, comically, refrained from clapping. Up in the balcony, though, a faint clapping was heard, as if in fading echo.

  “Let this always be your relation to each other and your properties—at least while you are on my stage. You are at once omnipotent and unable to move. That is because you will always be caught up, trapped, in the rigid and therefore false drama of character-making—or perhaps I should call it ‘me-making,’ which happens off the stage as well as on the stage, in exactly the same way—”

  “ME-MAKING INDEED!” shouted Sir Edwin from the gloomy balcony. “O ROMEO, ROMEO, WHO THE BLOODY HELL DO YOU THINK YOU ARE?”

  As Charles was his company’s Romeo, he winced inwardly, thinking Sir Edwin was speaking directly to him. He half-smiled, sourly, rolled his eyes.

  In this momentary vacuum, Teddy spoke: “Rennie DAY-cart walks into a bar. Bartender asks him if he’d like a beer. Descartes says, ‘I think not.’ And disappears.” Nobody laughed. Charles began to speak but was interrupted by wheezing from the balcony. When it lapsed into silence, he continued.

  “You have no past but whatever you and I make up for you via a pseudo-Stanislavskian method. You have no future but a hope of applause in your own personal limelight. Your present is dictated to you by a script that seems to be autonomous but that is generated every second of every day via an iron-clad will that confirms you in your increasingly rigid beliefs about who you are and how you act. We’re all having a great deal of fun with our misunderstanding of Monsieur Delsarte: we raise our arms quickly overhead then just as quickly throw our hands to our thighs, and voilà, we have induced laughter in ourselves and if we are lucky in our audience or at least somehow given an impression of it! HOWEVER: I want you to ask yourself what you might be forgetting. I want you to allow me to answer that question for you: you are forgetting that you are nothing without gesture. Try to speak without gesturing. Wrap yourselves in the winding sheets we have been using as we study Strindberg. Lie down in those sheets. Speak your lines. What happens? Meaningful sounds become less meaningful somehow. In certain circumstances they will veer dangerously toward annoying and incomprehensible noise. And unless you have been trained as Mother and I have been trained, you will not even be able to make your noise hearable. Certainly we can be noisy old interfering clowns if we choose to be, but even then, what kind of clown fails to make himself, to make his clowning, clear? What kind of clowns are we on this pathetic little stage?”

  “PURVEYORS OF BOMBASTIC NONSENSE!” shouted Sir Edwin who was apparently on his knees in the first row of the balcony, for only his head could be seen, catching a little light from below, over the parapet.

  The company looked up at him as one. He waved, waggling his fingers next to his monstrous head.

  “We are nothing,” Charles said, stifling incipient laughter, fearing Sir Edwin might think he was being made a fool of and hurl himself into the orchestra pit. The theater was so small and so steeply raked that he could conceivably land onstage and perhaps kill one of his actors along with himself. “Nothing without gesture and without an authentic desire, need, love for our properties. Have you not noticed how compelling a scene it is when two of our stagehands carry lumber across the stage, bang with their hammers, rip back and forth with their saws? When the plumber lights his oxyacetylene torch? When our stage manager confers with me about a problem in our schedule? These are ‘real actions,’ you will say, and must therefore have a kind of ordinary gravitas we perforce cannot have, because we are only pretending to act. But you will also say that we usually take no notice of these actions. We do here only because they move in such stark contrast to what we do. We who mince and blubber and wail and gesticulate, or stand helpless and stiff as ramrods, in the belief that our ridiculous fakery is exactly what the customer has bargained for and indeed delights in. Further, it seems apparent that the more ridiculously we behave, the greater their delight. But that is not so. Instantly—instantly—as soon as you step out onstage like some mechanical contraption, flapping your arms, grimacing with childish drollery because, oh, oh, the theater brings out the child in everyone, running on a teaspoon of steam that’s hissing out your asshole, barking your tragic or witty lines or striking a pose like you’re trying to plug your asshole, they will know that they have been had. When they throw rotten fruit and vegetables at us? Know why they do that? Not because they see how fraudulent we have been, but when they see how bad we are at being fraudulent! Le geste est tout! Everything in the world of the act, all communication is sung, or perhaps hummed is the better word, the humming accompanied by helpful gestures that people see instinctively and immediately as dance. Or if not immediately and as dance, then without much delay or doubt as something the woefully misunderstood and discredited Delsarte believed was ‘the direct agent of the heart . . . the revealer of thought and the commentator upon speech.’ The artist, and make no mistake, we are artists, should have three objects: to move, to interest, to persuade. We interest by language; w
e move by thought; we move, interest, and persuade by gesture. Speech is an act posterior to will, itself posterior to love; this again posterior to judgment, posterior in its turn to memory, which, finally, is posterior to the impression. HAVE I GOT THAT RIGHT, SIR EDWIN?”

  “Yes,” he said, barely audible from the balcony. “Do carry on.”

  “Which is to say, everything lies static and helpless in the brain until we can figure out how best to present our show to everything that we perceive to be outside our brains. Our audience.”

  Vera began to clap, but nobody picked it up, and she stopped.

  Three days later, Charles arrived at the motorcycle shop, devoted still to the idea of taking her to Sutro Baths, to, generally speaking, picking up where they’d left off with the appearance of Warren Farnsworth.

  “You said something about a bad year?” asked Charles.

  They were standing on the sidewalk, waiting for a jitney driven by a friend of Vera’s.

  “Yes,” she said. “Last year.”

  “What was it,” Charles asked, “if you don’t mind my asking, made last year so bad?”

  “The free press became markedly less free.”

  “Did it indeed?”

  “Indeed it did!”

  “Beg your pardon if that sounded—”

  “Not at all.”

  “—ironic. Life is ironic and I make it a principle to be simple and straightforward whenever possible to maintain a clear and useful distinction.”

  “Not at all, not at all! Clearly and usefully distinct!”

  “Even more simply and straightforwardly I must admit I hadn’t noticed—”

  “No, of course not, you were looking at the surface of the newspaper. The repression was—is—being worked below the surface.”