by Gary Amdahl
“Of course. I have no difficulty believing you. That is in fact why I am apologizing: that I should have been caught out staring at the surface. Me! It’s absurd. I feel like an—”
“Well, you mustn’t!”
“Very well. Thank you. Now please allow me to ask you how you yourself were able to see below the surface . . .?”
“I defended the press in the basement. I gave over a good deal of myself to it, in a fanatical, Russian-style defense of the secrecy of the location of this press. For the sake of its freedom. A great deal. And I lost that great deal. I wasted it. Only three people knew the press was here, and because I was its minder, its drone, because I volunteered, I felt very deeply responsible for it, and I stayed there, in that room, for a year. I’m not kidding. A year. Never went out. They brought my meals into me, and yes, some books. What was I so afraid of? In the land of the free and the home of the brave? Isn’t the freedom of the press secured in the Constitution? Who cared that we were printing what we were printing? You may ask all those things and be only reasonable. Maybe my fear was unreasonable! But let me tell you, this was a question—the location, the existence, of a certain kind of press, an uncontrolled press, one that was in truth free—that had already had, believe it or not, grave consequences attending its answer! Your father will never see a speck of evidence to back up my claim, but let me assure you, Mr. American, it is true.”
Vera stopped, removed her glasses, and cleaned them. Holding them in her hand, she resumed her speech in a quieter voice. “Then I had a little bit of a collapse, my consciousness collapsed into a pool of tears, and you know, they got me out of here, took me to Sutro Baths and so on, but I didn’t like being outside. I felt I was transparent. Almost.”
Wildly in love with her, thinking just that, Charles said nothing.
“There’s no way that can make sense. You give your life over to spreading the news, you know, letting people hear what’s really going on, but at the same time you are yourself some kind of terrible secret that must never get out. Like I say, I was already pretty Russian around the edges, and I was reading Nechayev’s Revolutionary Catechism. You know what I mean, I think . . . .”
She looked up and mistook Charles’s expression of overwhelming desire for evidence that he did not in fact know what she meant, that he was disdainful almost to the point of anger.
And yet she drew much closer.
“The revolutionary can have no love, no friendship, no joy, no life, no self. All is required by the revolution. Everything is sacrificed for the sake of others. You starve for the starving, suffer oppression for the oppressed, terrorize for the terrorized, murder and destroy for the murdered and destroyed. But now I don’t give a shit. I mean that in a positive way. The press is beautiful. It’s just like William Morris’s and he was a beautiful man: fine, okay, good. But its days are numbered. They’re going to get it sooner or later and they’re going to smash it to pieces, so why make myself crazy watching over it, like some daffy shepherdess. I’ll use it while I can. When they take it, I’ll use something else. See? I’m all better!”
Better or not, she appeared to have exhausted herself, for she sat down on a bench in front of one of the shop windows, this one displaying the painted symbol of the Flying Merkel brand, and held her head in her hands.
As they drove across the dunes of the Western Addition, Charles recounted his days as a competitive swimmer. “With my long arms and legs and broad shoulders, I was a natural swimmer and as helplessly gifted physically as I was mentally and socially. I quickly became captain of the team. Then a gentleman from Hawaii arrived on the scene. He was an ambassador of an ancient Polynesian pastime called “wave sliding,” and was reputed to be an excellent swimmer as well. An exhibition race was arranged between the Sutro Baths Club and the Hawaiian, and while everyone understood that the Hawaiian was possibly the best swimmer in the world, it was also widely believed that old Charlie Minot could upset him, given the home water and proper circumstances. Some would have inserted weights in the Hawaiian’s trunks but couldn’t figure out how to do it without being noticed. In fact, we were neck and neck for the first fifty yards, the Wave Slider and the Boy Wonder. Quite a large crowd was in the grandstand, and they made quite a lot of noise in that echo chamber until the turn, when the Hawaiian pulled away as if he’d had a Swedish outboard motor attached to his feet. He finished the second fifty so swiftly he seemed to have been pretending during the first. That, Vera my dear, was in fact how I saw it, and I was humiliated.”
Vera laughed at the idea of such trivial humiliation.
They arrived and walked into the large entrance hall. A photograph of the competitors was framed and hung in the gallery that marked a diversion to the Sutro Baths’ Museum of California. The photograph was signed by the Hawaiian, who went on to win a gold medal at the Olympics in Stockholm and become the sheriff of Hawaii, and everyone is smiling good-naturedly in his dark and charismatic presence—“Save me,” said Charles as he and Vera stood leaning toward it in serious examination, “over whom you surely see a cloud of truth passing. I was not only imperfect, I was cold. The women were all over the Hawaiian. Oh, I suppose they were in some sense all over me as well, given that I was wealthy and good-looking, and this was 1913 when all was well in our once-more-fair city—but a powerful force repelled them. I found them daffy, trivial. When pressured to treat some matter or thought with serious attention they became mean or defiantly stupid. Of course I was afraid I was taking my own—my own what, deficiencies of spirit?—out on them, didn’t want them to feel repelled, and eyed them all as if I were simply a particularly choosy Don Juan. But something else, much deeper, much stranger, was wrong with me. I thought, yes, there is one reality that is immutable, and that is where my spirit resides, but there is another reality, one that changes constantly and which can be, which ought to be, somehow, enjoyed. But I could not.”
Oh yes, he was a man, a holy Romantic man, and women still loved him, would still love him, after his voice changed, after he was no longer an angel. They would love him no matter what his voice sounded like. Love him because he was rough and immediate at the same time he was holy and remote. He was, on the stage of the theater of the universe, a great player, a great and holy player, capable of anything and everything. He would be loved immoderately and never forgotten. He would compose as Pergolesi had composed, if only for himself—the Voice was in the Mind—and live on brightly lit stages, exposing the real for what it was: a sham. And when he died, he would be remembered by everybody but mourned only by a handful, who knew who he really was, what he had really done, and the women who had shamefully, secretly loved him as a boy, who had petted and kissed him to the point where he’d had to take a firm step back and give them a look: a cock of the head, eyebrow charmingly raised, a half-smile. You have enlightened me. Now, darling, go away. Enlightenment, endarkenment—he had to fiddle constantly with his terms and in the end was not all that interested in consistency and cogency. If, in the back of his mind, there was tacit admission that once or twice perhaps it was at him the looks had been given, coming from the shadow faces above the long, slender, gloved arms that had removed the delicious cheeks and swelling bosoms . . . that hardly mattered, either. What mattered was the smell of the perfume. The taste of the skin. The faint rushing sound of the fabrics of their dresses. The looks in their eyes as they lied to themselves and saw him refusing to lie to himself, were frightened or in a sexually muddled awe of him—or, yes, appraised him from a new vantage point which they refused to let startle them: The little angel wants me! This is San Francisco—might I . . . get away with it? If they wanted it, they would have to come and get it, because he knew he did not know how to get it for himself. Or rather, he knew but felt a constraint he was not yet willing to loosen. But oh, he would give it to them and take it from them because he wanted it and wanted to give it away—but he knew. He was not a fool. The constraint was there for a good reason. He was a sound and balanced young man in a state of perman
ent temptation by Lust for the Unreal. Even if he went blind! Feeling alone would be enough, because the whole of his body could see: the palms of his hands following the curve of their shoulders, his fingers lightly tracing their lips—because, of course, out of tender pity, they would allow him to explore their bodies with his hands: it was the least they could do for the little angel singing in the heavenly darkness. Women would want to make love to his portrait centuries after he’d become rags and bones. He let himself think these thoughts. He could use them when he performed. He allowed himself to revel in it, but then, quickly, quickly, but not hastily, not insincerely or conveniently, the revelry would turn resolutely to revilement. He was not a rake. He would make no progress. After a while, he would step off the stage and never return. He would not, could not, hate his body. He would simply put it off. Yes, another controversial thought: sex was a childish thing. He would put it off, shake it off like a coat, fold it over the back of a chair, give it to the Salvation Army. San Franciscans who, let our wise little angel speak candidly for a moment, who more often than not were not the masters of the Deadly Sins they entertained, who were caught up in the whirlwind of politics and business of Regeneration, who said, who orated it, that they worked for the miserable poor, for the welfare of every citizen of—let us say it again, humbly, the greatest nation the world has ever known, but who, in the end, couldn’t quite be parted from one penny of their profits or one wan meaningless exercise of power? Oh, it was not only the bedrock of the American way of life—whether they conquered their sins or their sin conquered them, or if it was a draw, an inconclusive negotiation, it was as important to Charles, the young man who had waited out his time as an adorable angel and was now ready for Regeneration of his own making, as anything could possibly have been. Charles aimed to be a Christian artist. A humble artist, not a crazed zealot. His heart was wholly engaged, as was his mind. If he was not a zealot he nevertheless saw no room for the compromise of his belief. The fevers came and went. That was life. He lived. As an eleven-year-old boy he had read, on his surprised and pleased sister’s advice—she had been learning to calm her nerves not with the power and glory but with the solace and wonder, the serenity of Christ—Rauschenbusch’s Christianity and the Social Crisis and then, in the wake of the disaster, the horror, he had seen the actual nature of the Universe. If the connection was obscure to his friends and family, obscure to the point of irrelevancy, that only confirmed him. You helped the poor with food and shelter and clothing and a love that was just like the love you had for yourself, and when that was not enough—as surely it could never be—you demonstrated the unreality of everything around them, thereby helping them by preparing them to die—not just die, but die with joy and relief and expectation of eternal bliss. Everything could disappear in an instant and be replaced in an instant. Everything in fact was destroyed and remade every instant. There was nothing more dependably solidly real than the imagination, and the best place to demonstrate the incontrovertible reality of the imagination was on a stage.
If you could not afford a ticket, space would be made for you anyway. He did not want to work it out systematically, philosophically. He wanted to make it. He wanted to make it appear on a stage, like a magic trick that suddenly made everything around it the illusion. There was your salvation, wretched of the earth: the only life is in Jesus Christ, and you have to be destroyed to know it. Watch the brightly colored mannequins on the stage and you will see The Way.
“Christopher Newman is the name of the character you are playing in The American.” Sir Edwin spoke calmly but firmly to Charles, who had suddenly realized what an abyss lay between rehearsal and performance, and who was consequently experiencing the last condition he thought he would ever feel, that of “stage fright.” He had somehow convinced or duped himself, via his own obscure speeches to the company, into thinking something was at stake that had never been at stake before, and was going to pieces. “You are like him in many ways, perhaps too many ways: Newman could have been your grandfather—”
“The chronology isn’t quite right—more like a much older brother of Father’s, or a half-brother from an earlier marriage.”
“And while your diligence in constructing a biography of Newman that would have pleased Stanislavsky in the early years of the Moscow Art Theater is remarkable and laudable, it would not have much impressed the Stanislavsky of today, now that the idea that it can all be worked out in advance of the actor appearing on the stage and moving about has been repudiated as being of little avail when the actor does in fact appear on the stage and move about—repudiated as being an actual and frustratingly burdensome hindrance. The tone and volume of your voice, the manner of your accommodation of the other actors onstage with him, the nature and timing of your gestures and the effect the properties you handle has on you—this is as you have tirelessly and perhaps tiresomely noted is what matters, and is the means by which Christopher Newman might be located and animated. You are to spend no more time on thought, but quickly and quietly enter into what is to be done, whether you are James’s Newman, Shakespeare’s Romeo, or Strindberg’s Arkenholz. If you insist in your panic on illustrating your speeches to make sure everyone understands, you will, I assure you, vanish from the stage. It is a magic trick, from which anti-magic will spring. You are a big, tough Christian.” Sir Edwin was now, inexplicably, speaking with a Russian accent. Charles supposed it was because they had been talking about Stanislavsky. “You are at home in world.”
“Do you mean me or Newman?”
Sir Edwin waved his hands in disgust. “I dun’t care which one. You must be at home in world or we will bore audience to greatest disgust they can endure without throwing rotten vegetables at you. You must be, can only be, who you are. What does Polonius say to you, whoever you are, you ridiculous boy. ‘To thine own self be true. And it must follow as the night the day, thou canst not then be false.’” He had reverted to stage English for this quotation and waved off Charles’s certain question as to why he was talking about Hamlet all of a sudden.
“I understand that,” Charles said, “but I can only play such a man as a cartoon.”
“You can only be self as if you are cartoon.”
“Yes.”
Sir Edwin produced a notebook and asked Charles to read out a marked passage.
“‘He was not given, as a general thing, to anticipating danger, or forecasting disaster, and he had no social tremors. He was not timid and he was not impudent. He felt too kindly toward himself to be the one, and too good-naturedly toward the rest of the world to be the other. But his native shrewdness sometimes placed his ease of temper at its mercy; with every disposition to take things simply, it was obliged to perceive that some things were not so simple as others. He felt as one does in missing a step, in an ascent, where one expected to find it.’”
Sir Edwin clapped his hands and stood up from his favorite seat in the balcony. He suggested loudly that if Charles moved about the stage as if both timid and impudent, such behavior would be tiresome for an audience and finally unendurable. It would be his own fault because he could not or would not get over himself and simply be himself.
“You are actor,” said Sir Edwin. “Act.”
“I do not have this character within me. I would be perpetrating a ridiculous fraud upon our audience if I pretended I did. And whether or not they find my honesty tiresome, as you say, I do not care.”
“Stop whining and fretting and complenning and do what you must do.”
“I am not whining and fretting and—”
Sir Edwin shot an arm out from beneath his cloak and silenced Charles: If he was this certain kind of very particular fraud, why then not simply admit it? Why not accept himself for what he was and have the courage of his convictions? If he was a fraud then why could he not say so to the people who mattered, the ones who were paying good money to hear what he had to say? If he was a fraud he should stand there and defraud them all, not whimper to his fellow infants.
> “I am not whimpering.”
“You are whimpering coward, Charles!”
“Do not call me a coward.”
“Why! Iz not truth?”
“Is not hull truth,” Charles mimicked faintly.
“You are coward. You say it many times yourself!”
“When I say that I mean something else entirely.”
Sir Edwin swirled his cloak around himself as if he were waltzing with it. He made a grand gesture suggesting tragedy, then asked Charles if he did not know, could not tell, the difference between someone standing before him and earnestly trying to pass himself off as something he clearly was not, and an actor doing the very same thing.
“If you cannot, you are hupliss.”
Somewhere in the deep backstage, the carpenter who’d been battening a piece of twenty-four-gauge sheet iron to make a thunder sheet, dropped it; the ensuing crash of thunder caused the troupe—most of whom appeared to have been chatting but who were actually practicing the ancient commedia skill of grammelot, or nonsensical speech—to fall silent, just as they would have for the real thing.
“Very WELL!” shouted Charles. “I am HUPLISS!”
Because his Russian accent was funny, and because he had been experimenting with makeup techniques that were supposed to make him look twenty years older but which actually made him look like something halfway between a Minoan god-king and Rigoletto, a court jester with painted wrinkles and a square, curly beard pasted on his jaw, and finally because the conversations that had been interrupted had been intense but meaningless, his temper tantrum triggered a hilarity that was almost unnatural in its duration. But at its close he too was wiping tears of joy from his eyes. He felt he had learned something of great value. He was at least at home in this world, and it was possible that he “loved” it, loved everything about it, including the crazy, stinking Sir Edwin, making believe, and his own stage fright.
