The Daredevils

by Gary Amdahl

  They would open in three hours.

  He sat slumped and ill in a low broken chair in the green room. His knees rose up before him, so low and broken was this chair, and because they were so prominent, he tapped first one and then the other and then the first again with his diamond-studded walking stick. After a few minutes of this, he rearranged himself, the stick now between his legs, bearded chin and dove-gray gloved hands resting on the pearly knob. He appeared to be listening to something or someone, but no one in the cramped little room was speaking. His knees had brushed his chin when he walked up the smoky staircase the night of the fire—why had he felt so calm then, and so sick now?

  There were six others: Teddy Blair, whose demeanor was unassuming but whose voice was both explosively large and exquisitely controlled, got up to look like a portly older man, perched on one arm of my chair, smoking pensively a cigarette in a very long holder; two young women, Vera dressed to suggest a princess of the Second Empire, the other, the shockingly pretty Mary Girdle, a social-climbing bohemian trollop, both staring at, alternately, themselves and each other in a big but cracked mirror framed with electric light bulbs which gave them looks of stark madness; another young man, a dandy from the Philosophy Club, Eugene Woodcock, playing a charming ne’er-do-well, who appeared to be praying, his eyes closed tightly, his hands clasped, and his mouth trembling with the shapes of words; also from Berkeley and the P. Club, a much older man not associated with the university, Leonardo Garagiola, playing a very old man; and a plain, athletic middle-aged woman only recently arrived from Michigan, Margaret Stensrud, playing an ancient dowager, who, with Leonardo, was peering intently at her game of solitaire.

  There were others but he had lost track of them. He had never known them and he did not want to know them now.

  Suddenly the old man broke away and walked briskly to the doorway of an adjoining room—one of the spaces of the theater that had been burned and only hastily repaired—where the others had silently chosen to sequester themselves. He looked in at them and rubbed his hands together as if in eager glee. Small, distracted chuckles could be heard for a moment from within. Then Vera, very much the princess, Claire de Cintré, suddenly shouted, “No, no, no, you look just right! You look perfect, you really do! It’s the stupid play that looks wrong! You look alluring. You look wonderful.” And the other threw herself into her friend’s arms. They hugged and kissed and withheld makeup-smearing tears with desperate care.

  Beyond the little rooms somewhere, the continuo group, augmented for opening night with a wind band, began to play “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Charles laid his cane across his lap and bent forward, pale and sweating now, until his head was between his legs. They could hear the audience now too, singing along lustily. One of the plumber’s surviving little sons stuck his head in the room and called out that the house lights were going to half. Charles dropped his cane with a clatter and vomited.

  Little notice was taken. He himself was too exhausted to care. The Marquis de Bellegarde lifted his foot away from the splatter and said, “They start singing the national anthem and Chuckles throws up!” He stood and adjusted his false belly. “I’ll get you a glass of water, bud.”

  “Here’s a rag!” whinnied the dowager in her stage voice. “Poor dear!” She hadn’t looked up from her game, however.

  “How very ironic,” the old man concluded, shooting his eyes comically left and right.

  “Ironic?” murmured the dowager.

  “That Chucky should vomit at the sound of the anthem when he’s—”

  “Mmm . . .? Oh yes. Yes, I see what you are—MY GOD I WISH THEY’D STOP THEIR CATERWAULING!” She wiped her eyes. “It’s like a church service.”

  Charles stood uncertainly, then drew himself up with a deep breath. To polite applause, he announced that he was all right and that he felt better, none of the diamonds had been dislodged from his incredibly expensive prop cane, everything, he was sure, was going to be okay. The dandy and the trollop left the room. The marquis said that it sounded as if half of San Francisco were out there.

  “How many seats have we?” he asked.

  The princess replied that he knew perfectly well how many.

  Everyone was now on edge and eager to show it with any kind of clamped-down hysteria they could find.

  The dowager swept the cards from her little table with a cry of outrage. “But I don’t, dear!”

  “One hundred and thirty-seven,” Charles said, accepting the glass of water.

  The plumber’s son poked his head around the door again and said they’d sold fifty standing-room-only tickets as well.

  “No!” cried the very old man.

  “Yes they did,” insisted the little boy.

  Charles let the rag drop to my feet. The vomitus was actually little more than bile and saliva, and he toed the rag back and forth in it, soaking it up. When he stopped, he looked up to find everyone in the room watching him.

  “Where,” inquired the marquis, “is one’s valet when one has need of him?”

  “Fuck you,” said Charles, without real conviction, rehearsing.

  “Fuck me?” asked the marquis, equally wanly. He stood and adjusted his sash. “Fuck you.”

  Charles stooped and quickly brought the smelly, dripping rag to the marquis’s nose, who scrambled out of the way, bumping into the very old man, who in turn sat down in the lap of the dowager, who had picked up her cards and dealt herself a new game. They all laughed.

  “I’ll beat you all with my diamond-studded cane,” offered Charles.

  “Oh yes, please!” they all moaned and jiggled.

  “Places,” hissed the stage manager, who appeared out of nowhere. “What on earth is the matter with you people?”

  “You have upset my game,” said the dowager coolly. “Goddamn you to hell.”

  She and the princess crossed themselves, the princess suddenly pale and crazy-looking, her deep voice even deeper now with dread. “Here we go,” she said, as if from the tomb.

  The dowager went to pieces again. “We are just not ready!” she shrieked. “I can’t believe you’re going to force us out there like this! To just . . . throw us out there! To the, to the . . . to the dogs!”

  Charles sidled quietly over to the princess and told her that he was in love with her. He had clearly said it as Christopher Newman, but he had said it in a place where Christopher Newman did not exist. And saying so gave him an erection—he couldn’t understand it: it was not something that would happen to Christopher Newman. Refusing to turn her face to Charles, Vera glanced at him with a kind of calm but insane expectancy.

  “Do you love me?” he asked, not knowing what else to say, and having no time to think about it.

  “No,” she said, swiveling her eyes back at him. “No, Charles, I do not. But I will suck your cock after our first scene.”

  “You will?” he asked.

  “Yes. I will.”

  “All right.”

  “Why shouldn’t I?” she wailed in sudden terror. “Give me a thousand dollars and I’ll do it.”

  Theater was happening and nobody could stop it.

  Charles felt suddenly defeated. “It won’t work. Never mind. If you need some money I’ll give you some.”

  Sir Edwin stood in the doorway, rubbing his hands just as the very old man had done. Never before had he seemed so completely depraved a monk as he did then. Charles saw now only looks of panic and frank hatred on those faces that had beamed only the day before, the hour before, with childlike devotion and the most intimate trust in his mystic vision, and so was not surprised to see their Mad Englishman gone from the doorway when he looked back.

  He walked from the green room to the nearest wing, still sipping his glass of water, and examined the scenery-flat flying ropes knotted to the pin rail. The knots, he believed, looked secure and well tied. He climbed up to the fly gallery: shipshape here as well. He was no longer ill, no longer afraid; he was in fact utterly oblivious to his surroundings. A
s if he were a casual bystander, he looked out onstage, at the “shabby sitting room on a small Parisian quatrième,” sparely suggested by odds and ends of furniture collected from the theater’s patrons—from people, he marveled, like Durwood Keogh. He loathed Keogh, of course, but could not say why, not precisely, in that moment anyway, and was stricken with gratitude at the gifts of furniture. The curtain was still down, but he could feel the force, the weight of nearly two hundred expectant people just beyond it. He felt curious and intrigued: it trembled, whatever it was out there, a faint wave that rippled from one end of the curtain to the other, as if the breathing of the audience had taken on the properties of a breeze. The idea that they were not individuals, but rather one great thing, was not new to him, or theater folk in general, but he felt it now—not in his guts, where it had just finished making him nauseous, but in his heart, where it made him not brave but fearless: he didn’t care. He didn’t think he cared, anyway, didn’t feel that he cared. And wasn’t that how daredevils felt? It was only one thing and he didn’t care what one thing might think or say about him, or even directly to him. It knew nothing of him, after all, if it thought he was not part of its own “one-thingness” and its judgment would perforce be poorly constituted, superficial, beside the point if not altogether contemptibly mean-spirited. He was now a little angry, and when he realized it, was surprised at himself. He wanted to be calm again. Not caring was not an acceptable alternative. He wanted to be serene and helpful. But that was not how he had been trained to enter the scene.

  “They will get the show they deserve, eh?” whispered the marquis, plumping his belly.

  “We had better be good,” Charles whispered, his heart suddenly pounding.

  “Yes,” agreed the marquis. “They will tar and feather us if we aren’t.”

  The curtain rose in voluminous, screeching jerks, and what had only seemed a polite silence was now terrifying condemnation. A man in the balcony cleared his throat.

  Would the balcony collapse?

  The footlights, which still ran on gas, snapped and quivered behind their mesh grating. The dandy chased the trollop, Noémie, around the stage. They scampered and minced in a way that made his heart sink. Noémie then stopped in her tracks and the dandy nearly collided with her: it was slapstick. It would be all right because slapstick was foolproof. She held up an imperious finger and said, “I declare that if you touch me, I’ll paint you all over!”

  And the audience, unaccountably, roared with laughter.

  “What do you know,” whispered the marquis. He and Charles exchanged an incredulous but pleased look; the laughter was infectious.

  He couldn’t wait now to get onstage. The first scene was interminable and then there he was, striding languidly, confidently, handsomely, richly, “the American,” into the limelight. He approached a painting around which Noémie coyly fluttered. He stared and stared for what in a theater seemed a very long time, a dangerously long time—but it was working, he could feel it and he liked it—and then he judged it. He pointed with his fabulous walking stick.

  “That’s just what I want to see!” he said with clear, carrying warmth.

  The audience knew he was a man for whom people would wait, for whom they would wait. They wanted to wait for Christopher the American. They wanted to know what he thought and why he liked the painting so much. They wanted, in that strange and almost perverse turning of the table that sometimes happens in show business, his approval.

  Charles’s approval.

  Noémie contrived to appear indifferent. “I think I’ve improved it,” she said of the painting, looking not at it, but at Charles. She could feel the audience’s wish to participate in his world, and saw that she could bask in their love if she played her cards properly. She quietly let her admiration become apparent as he let a good deal more of his character appear.

  “Well,” he said, “yes, I suppose you’ve improved it; but I don’t know, I liked it better before it was quite so good! However, I guess I’ll take it.”

  He was neither, strictly speaking, himself nor Christopher Newman, and his agonized, neurotically observant introspection seemed vain and peculiar to him now, in that moment. He was acutely aware of employing himself to create the illusion of Christopher Newman, and confident that nothing could be more natural than to do so. “He” was a decent and amiable but shrewd and relentless man who’d made a fortune after the Civil War and who had come to Europe to spend some of it, a lot of it, “learning about beauty.” When the beauty turned out to be visible to him solely in the face of a young French widow, and he was confronted with the absurd strictures of the ancient families of the aristocracy—who were eager to bathe in the rivers of his cash but who could never allow him to marry one of their own—his quiet outrage and candid determination to have his reasonable but passionate way filled the theater. He loved the sad and lonely Claire with all his great and open heart, and he would be damned if he could not make the world work the way he wanted it to work.

  The one great thing took him in, amplified him a thousandfold, and sent him back to himself in wave after wave until at the end it all seemed to be crashing on the stage. They were already cheering and whistling and stamping before he could say his last lines: “Ah, my beloved!” and kiss Claire’s hand, causing her to cry—she who had been so remote and resigned to despair for three solid hours—“You’ve done it, you’ve brought me back, you’ve vanquished me!”

  Just before the curtain-closing kiss, he shouted, bellowed really, in his superb opera-quality tenor, as it was now quite hard to hear, “THAT’S JUST WHAT I WANTED TO SEE!”

  The orchestra played a Sousa march throughout the rainstorm of applause, while the cast, bowing repeatedly and smiling broadly, waved little American flags. The only cloud of truth that passed between himself and the audience was his glimpse of Sir Edwin in the wings. Neither smiling nor frowning, seeming neither pleased nor relieved, he watched Charles demonstrate his gracious ease, his graceful courage, in Neverland—and of course Charles watched him. He had not the faintest throb of an erection: dead dead dead. An erection was, he had decided, the only sure indication he was alive. Millions of souls, swiftly and easily replaced, every time he came. So yes, he was troubled even as the packed house cheered and cheered and cheered him.

  Around a lighted doorway on Filbert, halfway between Stockton and Grant, next to the motorcycle shop, he could make out ten or fifteen figures, people, no doubt, conversing unintelligibly and waiting for their turn to ascend a narrow flight of stairs. Those in the yellow light gestured to those in the shapeless dark. When he appeared, way was made for him, as it always was, and he climbed the stairs slowly. He reached the yellow lamp itself and perceived it as some kind of lamp in a fairy tale, with a life of its own and a secret, or as a beacon very far away that only seemed near because of a trick of sorcery or atmospheric anomaly. A small group had formed around this light and in the open doorway. Talkers gestured carelessly with drinks as they worked elaborate rhetorical figures. He entered an apartment in which a common party or reception appeared to be taking place. Noisy and crowded, the room looked as if it had been shaken in the earthquake and neglected since. It appeared to tilt: the lines of the walls, floor, and ceiling seeming neither parallel nor perpendicular. Wallpaper, depicting various scenes from The Odyssey, hung in peeling strips from the walls, and the floorboards were warped and discolored. The place was less sturdy than a stage set, and less convincing. There were newspapers everywhere, scattered as if they’d been caught by a wind, stacked in sloping piles next to anything that might support them, rolled up in people’s fists, spread open on tables.

  Turning from the crowd to the wall and the bookshelves against it, he saw many volumes of Balzac, in French, bound in blue. He selected his favorite, Le Père Goriot, opened it, or rather let it fall open to a page upon which it had, clearly, many times before been opened, to where the cynical, worldly wise lodger Vautrin is exposed as a criminal mastermind. He read to himself,
translating the French and remembering the English: “Vautrin was at last revealed complete: his past, his present, his future, his ruthless doctrines, his religion of hedonism . . . his Devil-may-care strength of character. The blood mounted in his cheeks and his eyes gleamed like a wildcat’s. He sprang back with savage energy and let out a roar that drew shrieks of terror from the boarders.” Is Monsieur Vautrin here tonight? he wondered. Is the owner of this building some kind of Vautrin? Is there perhaps not a flaw of Vautrinism in all of our characters?

  He picked up a newspaper to cover the swell of this attractive thought: The Tremor, one he’d never seen before. The masthead lettering was drawn as if it stood on shaky ground, little shivering lines suggesting vulnerability, uncertainty, and the front page featured a cartoon of a Pinkerton detective, a tiny but slope-browed and lantern-jawed head atop a huge, grossly muscled body spilling from a shapeless coat, drawn with a heavy but expert hand in dark smears of charcoal. The caption read, “IF YOU CAN’T BEAT ’EM, FRAME ’EM.” He studied the monstrous detective and saw now a little round bomb, spitting sparks, tiny as the fellow’s head, concealed in a meaty fist. Opening the paper, he glanced at one column, “The Fine Print,” and another, “A Fair Shake,” then shuffled and squared the pages, folded the paper neatly, and set it on the shelf next to the Balzac. A pleasant sense of peril overcame him, and he looked around the room with a mixture of furtiveness and mock-furtiveness: Were there in fact bombers here? Real bombers, dressed and speaking like ordinary citizens concerned about culture and the public weal? He remembered a breakfast table talk from a decade earlier: Father’s insistence that ninety-eight known dynamiters in the Bay Area were going to be rounded up, whether they’d done anything or not, whether, he had asked with the sarcasm his father detested, they were dynamiters or not. Might the place be raided by “authorities”? Might there not be people here wearing serious disguises—that is to say, real disguises as opposed to the fake ones they used on the stage? Might not the ratio of disguised to undisguised people be excitingly large?