by David Gates
“Listen, you’re a good man,” I said. “I’m going to do my best for you.”
“You’re a good man,” he said. “I think I drank too much again.”
—
“Daily, as we rehearse together,” old Granville-Barker wrote of his production of Twelfth Night, “I learn more what it is and should be; the working together of the theater is a fine thing.” I just wish you could have seen Julia as Olivia, in the scene where Malvolio comes in with his yellow stockings and she can’t imagine what’s gotten into him: she and Kenny worked out this business where she first had her hands over her mouth, then covered her eyes and watched Malvolio through her fingers, then let out a giggle—just one—despite herself. And meanwhile there was Barbara—always a joy to watch her—trying to keep a straight face as Maria. And even our Malvolio, who’d volunteered because he thought some “acting experience” might help his teaching: Kenny had him worming a finger under his cross-gartering as he said, “And some have greatness thrust upon them.” I’m not saying this was magical—I remember what magical was—but I was standing next to Kenny in the wings and saw him nodding yes.
Julia and Sir Andrew didn’t seem to be speaking. A couple of days after their little display at the Mexican restaurant, she and I were out front, watching the scene where he tells Sir Toby, “Your niece will not be seen; or if she be, it’s four to one she’ll none of me,” and he gave us both a look. “Whoa, whoa,” Kenny said, “why the stinkeye? Can we keep the fourth wall in place, people?” She put a hand next to my ear and whispered, “He needs to grow up.”
The morning of the dress rehearsal, the Eye on the Sky weather forecast was calling for ninety degrees, so we set up fans on the stage. I was sweating under my Beckett greatcoat, and I could see Julia was suffering in the long black mourning dress she had to wear in the first act. The prompter, an English teacher who’d retired from the local high school, had nodded off by the time we got to the recognition scene; poor Sebastian looked right, looked left—his bewilderment was actually more credible than he’d been able to make it before—and then went into improv: “O Viola, is it really thee?” By the time I had to sing “O mistress mine,” the guitar I’d borrowed from—now I’ve lost his name again, you know, Sir Toby—had gone out of tune. “Dress rehearsal is always a disaster,” Kenny told us. “Go home, forget about it, and tonight we fucking kill.”
After the performance, Julia’s parents had the cast over to their house on the village green: your standard-issue New England Federal, three stories, white clapboards, black shutters, oval plaque reading BUILT 1814 beside the front door. In the backyard they’d strung up chili-pepper lights and set out crudités, earthenware bowls of whitish dips, plastic glasses, a Manhattan skyline of bottles. Malvolio, who’d just promised to be revenged on the whole pack of us, was tapping a microphone while Sir Toby tuned his guitar; they’d been working up a “special” song together. Sebastian, still wearing his soldier jacket with the frogging, was pouring wine for Viola, who’d changed into jeans and a peasant top. No sign of our Sir Andrew. Julia was still in costume too—the white dress she wore in the last act, cut to make the tops of her pale breasts bulge out—and splashing liquor from her glass as she put an arm around Barbara Antonelli. I started for her, but Kenny touched the back of my arm and brought me over to the mother—a puffy-faced woman my age, whose wooden beads rattled at her tanned bosom when I air-kissed her—and then the father. “Tom,” he said, sticking out a hand. “You’re quite the actor, aren’t you? Even I could see that.”
“Didn’t I tell you?” Kenny said. “You’ll excuse me, I need to go over and pay homage to La Antonelli.”
“I shouldn’t be admitting this,” Tom said to me, “but I haven’t seen a real Shakespeare since I was at Yale—well no, that’s not true, we did see Julia when she was Puck, in sixth grade. Of course, as a father, the leading lady was the whole show.”
“I’ve been very impressed,” I said. “Kenny thinks the world of her.”
“Well, we all think the world of Kenny. He does a lot for this community—a lot for this family. He won’t tell you, but he’s the one who got her into Middlebury. He knows one of the muckety-mucks. You’ll never hear anybody say a word against Kenny Donnelly.”
Julia came over and put an arm around her father. “Kenny says I was naughty.” She reached out with the hand holding the glass and touched a finger to my nose—as she’d done in our first scene. (I’d sneaked a look at Kenny in the wings and saw him throw up his hands.) “I still think it worked.”
I saw the father’s face get red. “What was this?”
She kissed his fat cheek and said, “Just actor shit. Did you like me?”
“Hey, hey,” he said. “Language.” She took her arm away and touched my nose again.
“We tend to argue over the fine points,” I said, keeping my eyes off her breasts. “I doubt people out there even notice this stuff.”
“Don’t you have to do what the director tells you?” he said.
“There’s always some leeway,” I said. “Your daughter’s got good instincts.”
“Well, I’m sure you know more about it than I do. I thought you were both excellent. You need to go a little easy, Punkin’. Don’t forget you’ve got tennis in the morning.” He turned away to hug Viola. “Louise, you were terrific. And how about our girl?”
“Is he pissed,” she whispered in my ear. “He hates that I’m twenty-one.” She finished her drink. “I’m getting more. Come with?”
Malvolio was speaking into the mic. “Is this on? Okay, Marty and I worked up a little number for the occasion…”
“Oh, fuck,” Julia said. “Let’s get away from this.”
She took my hand, and as we moved to the back door I heard them singing in unison: “They’re gonna put me in the theater…”
We made it into the kitchen, where she shut the screen door behind us, then the wooden door, then leaned her back against it and raised her face.
“Now that you’ve got me,” I said, “what do you plan to do with me?” I went in for the kiss, and she turned her head.
“Make you wait,” she said. “Like you’ve been doing.” She flicked her middle finger off her thumb and hit my fly. “I have to get something. Meet me out front, okay?”
“You know, people saw us leave.”
She was already starting down the hall that led to the foyer, which had a fanlight above the front door. “We’re both adults,” she said. “Especially you.”
She went upstairs, and I found a bathroom off the hall. I hooked the door behind me and washed my face with cold water. You need to get out of this, I said to the mirror. Just the obligatory drunken line: it was as good as done. I waited for her out on the wide stone doorstep and traced the date on the plaque with my index finger, that song from childhood in my head: “Along with Colonel Jackson down the mighty Mississip.” She opened the door, still in the dress, thrust a pipe into my mouth and held a lighter over the bowl. Anybody could have seen us from the sidewalk, over the white picket fence. When I exhaled, she kissed me lightly on the lips and said, “Now one more.”
“You are crazy,” I said.
This time the smoke hit my lungs so sharply I had to cough it out. “Good,” she said. “That should do it.” We kissed full on: so wide and hard I felt I was biting through into the back of her head. She pulled away, breasts rising and falling. “You’re a bastard, you know that? Come.”
I followed her to a Lincoln Navigator parked at the curb. “Where are you taking me?”
“I want to see the famous henhouse. I’ll let you pretend I’m one of Kenny’s boys. I bet that’s what you’re really into.”
“You have a most inventive mind.” My voice sounded far away, and I couldn’t remember who Colonel Jackson was. “This is some strong shit,” I said.
“Door’s unlocked,” she said. “You need me to open it for you?”
“I’m fine.” This was a car door. It was not beyond me to open it.<
br />
I settled into the leather seat, thoughts coming too fast to focus on. She turned on air-conditioning, then music—some kind of music I didn’t know how to go about recognizing, except I knew the speakers must be amazing because you could hear all the way to the bottom. “What is this?” I said.
“Bob Dylan?” she said. And sure enough, it rearranged itself into—what was it? The one about threw the bums a dime, didn’t you, the famous one. “Isn’t that your age group? My dad had it in.”
“I thought it was an oratorio,” I said. A word I didn’t know how I knew.
“Wow,” she said. “Okay, I want to be where you are.”
She pulled over—or had we been moving?—and took her pipe out of the, whatever you call the thing between the seats.
Then we were on some road and the whole inside of the car was flashing blue. “Shit,” she said, and the music was gone: big silence. “Just don’t say anything, okay?”
Her window was down and a cop was standing there, shining a flashlight. “License, registration?”
“For real?” she said. “We were just out for a drive.”
“Yeah, your dad called.” He sniffed. “Been smoking that good shit tonight?” He shined the light between the seats. “What’s that? Give it here.”
She handed him the pipe.
“What else? Am I going to have to search the car?”
“It’s not hers,” I said. “I had it.”
“Aren’t you the gentleman. And you’re who?”
“He’s in the play,” Julia said. “He’s a friend of Kenny’s.”
“I bet he is. See some ID?”
I got my wallet out. “I don’t know what you need,” I said. “I have this.”
He shined his light on my Equity card. “The hell is this, insurance?”
“You can get insurance,” I said.
“ ‘Performing for You.’ Beautiful. How about a license.”
“He lives in New York, for Christ’s sake,” Julia said. “Nobody drives in New York.”
“I wouldn’t know. So, Julia. Do you have any idea why I stopped you tonight?”
“You said. My father called.”
“I guess you didn’t notice the stop sign back there. How many moving violations have you had in the last year?”
I looked around. We were out in the middle of the country somewhere. Blue flashes kept lighting up a collapsing barn. “Listen,” I said. “There’s nobody here. Can it be that I was driving?”
“What are you, simple? How did you think it was gonna be?” he said. “Get out of the car.”
“You’re not going to hurt him?” Julia said.
He shook his head. “Everything’s a drama, right? You got your cell? Why don’t you call your folks to come out here, get their car and drive you home.”
—
“See, that’s your problem, you never look on the bright side,” Kenny said as he drove me to the train. “You were getting too old to be a matinee idol anyway. Now, if they ever bring back Golden Boy…Are you hurting? I have some Percocet.”
“I fucked up your show,” I said. They’d broken my nose when they handcuffed me behind my back and shoved my face into the side of the cop car. Kenny came to get me in the morning and told me they were dropping all charges—possession, grand theft auto, resisting arrest—in return for my getting out of Vermont. Just a hundred-dollar fine for failure to carry a license. Apparently he was a big man in this town.
“Don’t give yourself airs,” he said. “Rick’s coming up. He’s going to take over Feste. We’ll miss Wednesday and Friday, and then he thinks we’ll be ready to roll.”
“How did this come about?”
“Pleading? Contrition? I’m an actor too, don’t forget. Actually, I think he was missing me.”
“Will he be able to do it?”
“We’ll see, won’t we?”
“Shit. Maybe I did you a favor.”
“One more favor like that and they will run me out of town. You need a keeper.”
“Listen, if you know of any.”
“Not of your persuasion,” he said. “I don’t know, I guess not of my persuasion either.” He looked at his watch. “We’re early. I’m still mad at you, by the way. You want to grab a drink?”
—
You’d think my Vermont adventure would have put me off the country life, but all this summer I’ve been renting a small house overlooking a lake in Dutchess County, where you can go out on the deck at night and sit and look up at the Milky Way. Which, yes, you can only do for so long. It was this or get the Profile restored, and I thought I might as well spend the money on myself, if you see what I mean. The trees have already begun to turn; tomorrow I have to give this place up and go back to the city.
Barbara came by this afternoon—she has a cottage in Katonah—and we sat out on the deck in the sunshine. She told me Rick and Kenny were on the outs again, though of course with those two…Anyhow, Kenny was in Chicago for six months, to put together the Lyric Opera’s production of The Balcony—who knew they’d made that into an opera? Twelfth Night, she said, had gone swimmingly. Rick had camped it up as only Rick could do, faking the parts he was sketchy on, and the audience loved him—not to say they hadn’t loved me. This was when I told her about my little bullshit epiphany in the Frankfurt airport.
“I can’t hear this,” she said. “You’re just feeling sorry for yourself. Use it.”
“Actually, I’m happy to be out of it all.”
She put her glass down. “You are, aren’t you? You prick. I always thought you’d go down with the ship. This isn’t about our little friend, I trust? You have to come to my gentleman’s club. You could still pass for a gentleman if you got your face fixed.”
“Just tell me when,” I said.
I made sure she got out of the driveway all right—we’d both been drinking the summer’s last gin and tonics, and this house sits right on a blind curve—and then walked out the sliding doors to the deck again. The air was getting chilly; going to need that jacket. The sun hung just above the trees, soon to turn the lake and sky orange, soon to be gone. And then the stars. You don’t imagine, do you, that anyone’s watching us, our love scenes and death scenes, and thinking, I see you what you are. But this has nothing to do with anything: I have my clothes to pack for tomorrow, the books I brought, the DVDs, computer, have to clean the bathroom, wash the last dishes, just a million million little things.
The Curse of the Davenports
Every Christmas Eve, my father used to drive us down to Uncle Wayne and Aunt Phyllis’s house: a two-bedroom box in a subdivision backed up against the Connecticut Turnpike. They didn’t have kids, but they tethered an inflatable snowman in the yard: their cramped living room, with twin plaid recliners, velour couch and a braided rug, smelled of cigarettes and their fat cocker spaniel. I remember asking my mother, as we were loading gifts into the trunk for them and Grandpa Davenport, how come we always had to go there. “I know,” she said, “but it’s only once a year. Be thankful you’re not the Christ Child.” She nodded at the life-sized crèche on our neighbors’ lawn and said, “What a dump.”
Yet here I was at forty-three, divorced and living in Wayne’s house. He’d had to put Phyllis in a home—she no longer recognized him or knew her own name—and he’d driven to Arizona in pursuit of a brassy-haired widow he’d met at Mohegan Sun. “Just pay the lights and the cable and we’re good,” he told me. “Somebody might as well be in there.” So spoke the voice of Christian charity. Surely, I emailed my mother, an unseen hand is at work. She wrote back: God is not mocked, followed by a frowny face.
—
I’d come back to Connecticut just once after college, to stand with my mother and Wayne—Phyllis was already a liability in public—at the veterans’ cemetery in Middletown. My mother sold our house in West Hartford, bought a condo in Santa Barbara and told me she wanted her ashes scattered in the Pacific: better to end up among the sharks and the oil slicks than among
the military.
I was a graduate student when Sarah came to Berkeley as an assistant professor, with witch-black hair and Katharine Hepburn cheekbones, and we reinvented the traditional academic scandal; a few of her colleagues even came to our wedding, when she was already pregnant with Seth, the flower of our unprotection. What a bad boy I was, and what a bad girl I made her be. We had a cottage in Oakland, with the old Sears, Roebuck gingerbread; during Seth’s naptime, we’d open our bedroom window to let in the scent of eucalyptus and edify the neighbors. If I’m sentimentalizing those days, bear with me. When Seth was eight, I started taking him to A’s games, and nobody gave us shit for not standing during the national anthem. My thesis (“Cattle Are Actors: Archetype and Artifice in Red River”) never landed me a job out there—who in the Bay Area didn’t want to teach film?—but I made some money copyediting and reviewed movies for a free weekly, in a column I called Be Generous, Mr. Spade. My takedown of Titanic got more letters than any other piece in 1997.
Still, when Sarah got an offer from Yale, what could I say? They even sweetened the deal with a gig of sorts for me, teaching composition alongside the TAs, and the weekly wanted me to keep sending in reviews. Like the good sport I think I hoped to be, I amused our acquaintances with a theory that New Haven wasn’t actually part of Connecticut, but a free city like Danzig or Trieste—no, better, West Berlin stuck in the middle of East Germany. A realtor showed us a turreted stone palazzo in what might eventually become a safe neighborhood, where we could live like New York Review of Books dissidents under house arrest.
But Sarah had seen enough smashed car windows in Oakland, and those genteel towns up the shoreline called out to her: the Congregational churches, the white-clapboard colonials, the maple trees and, God help us, the occasional American flag. Besides—cue the screechy shower music—Seth was starting high school. She found us a Federal house in Guilford, only a couple of exits from Clinton, where Wayne still lived, with foot-wide honey-colored floorboards. “Just promise me we’ll never own a Volvo,” I said, and we never did.
