The Ravine

by Paul Quarrington

  The play in question is entitled The Hawaiian, which is, in my fictive world, the name of a particularly seedy little tavern. (Almost all of my plays took place in bars—Write what you know, said Hemingway, although I bet he regrets that now.) Hester is the waitress. There are four regulars, witty young writers who discuss high-minded subjects like literature and philosophy. Into this scene walks Oscar, who has just murdered his parents and still clutches the smoking gun. As police surround the Hawaiian, Oscar takes the people hostage. Things get thenceforth pretty tense. The police exhort from outside, the people within plead urgently, tearfully, but Oscar is obdurate and deranged. It all culminates in the young man taking Hester as a human shield, throwing open the door to the Hawaiian with her neck caught in the crook of his arm, the gun barrel pressed up against her beautiful temple. (I know it’s hard for temples to be beautiful, but hey, we’re talking about Ronnie Lear here.) No solution seems possible, until Hester reaches up and squeezes Oscar’s trigger finger, sacrificing her own life for the greater good.

  You may think me an idiot—go ahead, be my guest—but the paucity of my ideas, the meagreness of my creativity, hasn’t really registered until just now. Until just this afternoon, anyway, which is when I wrote that last paragraph. I immediately reeled out of the basement apartment in search of stuporifics. I went first to the Pig’s Snout, but it was no longer there. In its place there was a small health club. Behind plate-glass windows, a group of women in leotards moved in sweaty synchronicity to music I could not hear. I stared at the edifice wistfully, until a policeman came and instructed me to move along. My avowals of innocent nostalgia fell upon deaf ears. It occurred to me that I was pretty much a lecherous voyeur, which didn’t improve my self-esteem. I searched out the nearest bar, the Reno, a place that survived on the welfare cheques of diurnal drinkers. There were six of these creatures represented as I slipped through the front door. I fell into conversation with an older man named Christos, who was so embittered by women and the vagaries of fate that I acquired a sheen of innocence through proximity and comparison. I was the one dealing out hopeful maxims: “Things are never as bad as they seem,” I said, not giving voice to the codicil, as long as you are blind, stinking drunk. I tried to discuss my own problems, but Christos couldn’t really see that anything was amiss. I had acted appropriately manly in fucking a young woman, and if my wife couldn’t accept that, I was well shed of her. My wife was, at any rate, certain to grow fat and disgusting. And if I’d managed to forge a career by filching from a bag of stolen ideas, more power to me. Or as Christos put it, “So fuck.” This little phrase was very versatile when spat through Christos’s moustache, which was huge and seemed to have a life of its own. Indeed, it sometimes seemed I was conversing with the moustache. “So fuck” could be freighted with despair, optimism or meek acceptance. So fuck.

  When night came, Christos and his fellows disappeared, fearful perhaps of having their blood drained by vampires, especially now that it was forty-proof. I toddled off to Birds of a Feather.

  Jay wasn’t talking to me, which you know, which you’ve heard, so fuck. I conversed instead with Amy, during those moments when she was ferrying me drinks. This was a tricky business, because I was tempted to order lots, not just to satisfy my wet tooth but to hold her near the table. Mind you, I wanted to present myself as other than a sot, so I staggered the beer and whiskey requests. This didn’t irritate her as it would many a waitperson, and it even seemed as though she came to empty the ashtray more often than was absolutely necessary. She asked how the novel was going and I lied and claimed it was going very well, although I admitted to a certain amount of inky grappling with the great unruly beast. Amy, it turns out, is a doctoral student in English, and has achieved All But Dissertation status. Her thesis has something to do with Anthony Trollope. Man, I wish I’d read some Anthony Trollope books; indeed, it has truly long been my ambition to do so. After all, Trollope is admirable on many counts; foremost in my mind is his modest industry. He spent a quiet life in London producing huge, weighty tomes. Dickens lived just around the corner, I believe, and Trollope maintained a friendship with Chuck, even though Dickens was rich and famous and had an actress for a mistress. The point is, I don’t believe there ever was an occasion when Tony Trollope threw down his pen in artistic despair and scrambled off to drink with a moustache named Christos. Anyway, my small victory was that I didn’t lie about my ignorance. I was tempted to do so; Hooper had bandied the name about years ago, in the Pig’s Snout, and I could have probably voiced a few of his observations and complaints re Trollope and claimed them as my own. But I didn’t. Instead I said simply, “You know what? I’ve never read any of Trollope’s novels.”

  “You,” said Amy, “don’t know what you’re missing.”

  At last call Jay began to improvise his jeremiad, variations on an air of sadness. That’s when I stumbled out of the bar, overtipping Amy and leaving her with a promise to read Barchester Towers, which I keep, believe it or not, on my bedside table. Granted, it is there mostly for protection against intruders, but I didn’t mention that.

  Despite fairly vast amounts of alcohol, I never became drunk, as is evidenced by the fact that I am typing this now.

  “Uncle Johnny?”

  “Jay?”

  “No, it’s Phil.”

  “My boner.”

  “Why did you think it was Jay?”

  “No reason.”

  “It’s just that you kind of jumped all over that. You know? Jay?”

  “He calls me more often than you do.”

  “Oh.”

  “He was over on Thanksgiving. He brought turkey.”

  “Really?”

  “Actually, he brought a bottle of Wild Turkey. We had a few little snorts. What did you do on Thanksgiving?”

  “Um … I forgot to give thanks.”

  “Uh-huh. Yeah, Jay told me you were having a few little problems, Phil. Well… shit happens.”

  “You said it.”

  “That’s the way the cookie crumbles.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “That’s life.”

  “Right.”

  “You need any more clichés?”

  “No, I’m good, Uncle Johnny.”

  “But, you know, you have to give thanks for the good things. And there’s a lot of good things in life. When I think back, I remember all sorts of good, good things.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Jane was a great lay.”

  “Okay, you know what, Uncle Johnny—”

  “She had a great little body. Tight.”

  “Uncle Johnny—”

  “And pepper steaks.”

  “Huh?”

  “Not that shit you get in Chinese restaurants, with green peppers, that’s no good. I’m talking about a steak with peppercorns actually embedded in the meat, and that beautiful sauce, I believe they make it with shallots and cognac. That … is what life is all about. Okay, now you go.”

  “What?”

  “You say something you think is good.”

  “Well … Okay, well, um…”

  “Is Veronica a good lay?”

  “Were you always like this?”

  “Like what?”

  “You just seem a little bit crude.”

  “How is Ronnie, anyway?”

  “She’s—”

  “Christ, what a rack on that babe.”

  “Uncle Johnny—”

  “Okay, lay it on me. Give me a good thing.”

  “That’s a tough one for me right now.”

  “How about this one, kid? Television.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “You should see the set-up I got now. I got this plasma screen, thing is like five feet wide. I got stacks of speakers. Woofers, tweeters, bass drivers. Super-deluxe.”

  “What do you like to watch?”

  “Not porn, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  “That’s not what I’m thinking.”

  “Be
tween you and me, it scares me shitless. Twats were never meant to be that big.”

  “So what do you watch?”

  “I don’t know. Lots of shit. Hey … when are we going to have a new episode of Padre?”

  “We’re not, Uncle Johnny.”

  “Why not?”

  “Edward Milligan is dead.”

  “Who?”

  “The star. Padre.”

  “Christ! That sucks sewer water.”

  “Tell me something, Uncle Johnny. You say Jay was over there, and he told you I was experiencing a few little problems?”

  “Check.”

  “But you don’t seem to know that I’m separated from Veronica—”

  “You’re kidding!”

  “—and you don’t seem to know that I’m experiencing some, um, professional difficulties.”

  “Yeah, I guess if the guy’s dead, that kind of puts the kibosh on Padre.”

  “What exactly did Jay tell you?”

  “Oh. He said that some greaseballs frightened you when you were a kid and now you’re emotionally stunted.”

  “Hmm.”

  “I said, Shit happens. That’s life. When I think back—over eighty-five years, kid, eighty-five fucking years—I can’t believe the shit that happened. And it all took me by surprise. Jane dying, my sister dying, meeting Claire, having a baby when I was forty-nine years old, Claire taking off with a kid younger than you … my god. There’s only one thing certain in life, Phil.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “Televisions just keep getting bigger and better.”

  “I’ll tell you why I called, Uncle Johnny.”

  “Oh, I know why you called. Same reason your brother calls. You guys want to talk to your mother, but she’s gone. So I’m the next best thing.”

  “I was looking in the mirror the other day. And I noticed something remarkable. I look just like you.”

  “Really? You’re all wrinkled and bald and your testicles drag on the ground?”

  “No, I mean I look just like you used to look. I’m big and boxy. I’ve got wavy hair with a distinguished streak of grey. Some people consider me handsome. I look just like you.”

  “Huh.”

  “Except for my spectacles, of course. So I guess l look like your secret identity.”

  “Oh yeah, I just remembered something else your brother said about you. He said you’ve been hitting the juice pretty hard.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Your mom would be worried about you, Phil.”

  “You know what, Uncle Johnny? Mom would be right to be worried about me.”

  13 | CAREER MOVES

  THERE WAS CONSIDERABLE EXCITEMENT DURING REHEARSALS OF The Hawaiian, none of which I noticed, being far too occupied with the wooing of Ms. Lear. I undertook this wooing with the cerebral detachment of a field marshal. I had plans and tactics, although I was always prepared to make a responsive or impromptu strike. A case in point: as I sat in the theatre watching rehearsals, I saw that the director was making moves upon Ronnie. He was in a strong position—the director/leading lady relationship is very intimate and always on the brink of becoming sexual, assuming that the participants’ inclinations run along those lines. I had campaigned to have The Hawaiian directed by Penn Goldman, who possessed very fine dramatic sensibilities and was gay as all get-out. But the play’s producers thought we needed a more masculine sensibility to deal with the table of regulars, who were all, to one degree or another, great heaving pigs. So George Gordon was brought in. You may remember, he was mentioned a few pages back; he had treated a woman so egregiously that he was hauled before the drunken and howling tribunal. Gordon had a good reputation as a theatre director and a very poor one as a human being. He treated actors shamefully, he fired designers impetuously, he was known to kick technicians in the seat of their pants if they happened to get in his way. He was especially rotten to writers, although—and I wish there were some way around this point—he quite liked me. “You and I, Philly,” he used to say, “understand each other.”

  Perhaps. Certainly I had insight into him, and when he sidled up beside Veronica and cooed, “That’s not quite on, beauty,” I knew what he was doing. (Incidentally, he wasn’t British, although that sentence might suggest he was. He was from Sarnia, Ontario, although very few people were in on that little secret.)

  “Sorry, beauty, that’s not quite what we need.”

  “How so?”

  “This woman, this Hester, I feel she should discover this, this, you know, this thing, within her, something she little suspected she had, this rare, rare…”

  “Rare what?”

  “Right, right.” I didn’t know if George Gordon was being an idiot due to his proximity to Veronica, or simply because he was one. “Her attitude.”

  “A rare attitude?”

  “No, darling, no. Her attitude when she, when you, attend the fellows. She seems strong.”

  I was sitting in the seats, in the shadows, a battered and splotchy copy of the script on my lap. I spent hours so, waiting for someone on the stage to ask for clarification. The most I ever got was Gordon shouting toward the loges, “Dropping that line! Too wordy!”

  “I don’t think she’s all that strong, George,” Veronica said, which made me wonder whether she ’d ever ended a sentence with my name; I decided she hadn’t, because it surely would have made me faint.

  George lowered his voice then; he also lowered his head so that it practically rested upon Ronnie’s chest. He spoke, hushed but urgent, causing various reactions on her part. Her brow furrowed, then smoothed with understanding. She bit on her bottom lip, and then she laughed. She stared at the floor and suddenly lifted her eyes until they met Gordon’s. She touched him on the shoulder and nodded. I was beside myself with grief.

  George Gordon spun around, hollering, “Let’s run it from when Hester comes in!”

  Hester/Veronica made her entrance, with an arm cocked upwards and her palm flat, because when props got her act together there would be a salver covered with draft glasses there. She stopped by the table of braying regulars, and I saw what change Gordon had effected; Hester was timid now, timorous, to the extent that her free hand floated about her nether regions as though on guard, ready to land and shield her most private self. This lent an interesting tone to her lines; I had crafted them with some wit (I thought), which now served as a huge defence. It struck me that Gordon was gearing Veronica’s entire performance toward the final moment; he wanted the audience to think that Hester was perpetually, eternally, a victim, and therefore incapable of the decisive act that was to come. That was how Ronnie played it all that day. I watched the two confer between run-throughs; they had begun to touch each other by way of punctuation, resting fingertips on shoulders, elbows, cheeks(!), and once, as Ronnie turned away, Gordon passed a hand across her perfect backside.

  This was danger, big danger. George Gordon was a Lothario, and although he was in some ways an ill-looking fellow (pale and rail-thin, his fingers so nicotine-stained that they glowed orange), I thought Ronnie was falling under his influence.

  After rehearsal that day, many people gathered at the Pig’s Snout. Veronica sat down beside me, which cheered me momentarily, until I realized that it was the only seat available. Across from us George Gordon held court, drinking too much (in apparent victory) and telling tales of squalor and scandal. Hooper came in, poor lost Hooper, and although he grabbed a chair and tried to ram it in between me and Ronnie, he couldn’t (I didn’t budge), and eventually he ended up sitting beside Bob Hamel, the most boring man in the universe.

  As drinks were consumed, everything became louder, a cloud of confusion descended upon the table, and at some point in the midst of all that, Veronica tilted her body toward mine and said quietly, “What do you think of George?”

  What would Rommel or Patton do under the circumstances? They wouldn’t pussyfoot around, that’s for sure, and neither did I. Screwing up my face with what I intended to pass
for considered reflection (but no doubt looked like exactly what it was, a goatish, hormone-addled grimace of sexual longing), I pronounced, “I think he’s an asshole.”

  Ronnie patted my leg, or squeezed my knee, or did some damn thing underneath the table that involved my limb and her hand, flick-eringly brief but chubb-producing. “I think you’re right,” she said quietly. “This Hester business, don’t you think it’s wrong?”

  “I think it couldn’t be wronger.”

  “There’s a word for it.”

  I panicked briefly: a word for what? A word for my expression—stupefied? A word for what was happening to me underneath the table—engorgement?

  “Madonna complex,” Ronnie recalled. “That’s what George has. It’s like women are saints, you know. Hester is this timid little virgin. I want to play her, you know, bolder. More real. Like a woman who’s done a few things. Laughed, had a drink, fucked. That way it means—jeez, Phil, you’ve gone really pale.”

  “You’re right.”

  “Sorry?”

  “Muwahhh …” (Which was me sucking in air, my lungs popping apart with an audible shudder.) “You’re absolutely right. Gordon doesn’t really understand women.” Please don’t ask if I do, please don’t ask if I do, let this pass as the truth. How could Gordon understand women, how could any of us?

  “What are you two prattling on about?” Because George’s ears stood at right angles to his skull, they were very powerful.

  “Just stuff,” said Veronica. “Just, you know, man/woman stuff.”

  “Oh, really?”

  John Hooper stood up from his seat and pretended to yawn. Actually, as he had been sitting beside Bob Hamel, the yawn may have been genuine, but it certainly didn’t look that way. It looked as if an alien, perhaps an invader from the Dog Star, Sirius, had occupied Hooper’s body and was controlling motion with some crude internal block and pulley. “Come on, Ron,” he said. “Let’s go.”

  “You go on, Johnny,” said Ronnie. She said these words in a very friendly fashion. Too damn friendly, so friendly that the Hooper/ Lear relationship was instantly defined as one of camaraderie. They were done as a couple, and Hooper stumbled out of the bar in utter despair. And although there has been a certain consistency in John’s attitude toward Veronica since then (you may recall his remark beginning “There is no man alive …”), I know that really he has never gotten over her. But I had no time, then, to reflect on this victory, because my potential happiness was being besieged by George Gordon. “The playwright and the leading lady,” he said authoritatively, as though quoting Sir John Gielgud or somebody, “shouldn’t be talking to each other.”