Mona in Three Acts

by Griet Op de Beeck

  25

  I stopped going to Louis’s readings a long time ago, but if we want to see each other for more than fifteen minutes this week, accompanying Louis to this one is the only option.

  In the car I tried to talk about the problems at the theater, it’s getting harder and harder for me to know what to do during rehearsals, but Louis apologized and asked whether we could keep that subject for the way home, he wanted to prepare himself.

  The organizer is a young woman, orangey-red lips, high cheekbones, red hair pulled tightly into a ponytail. She takes us on her high heels to the building’s greenroom, a route past hallways highly reminiscent of bunkers. Louis says he’s glad her beauty can help us forget the ugliness of these trenches, then he laughs at his own joke, to make clear that it is, probably, a joke. She turns her head and gives him a sideways smile. Once we’ve arrived in a room they’ve clearly tried to make cozy—you can see that from the color palette—she indicates the snacks that have been laid out, “All from the region,” she says, smiling with those lips of hers. Louis thanks her twice.

  Louis is good at evenings like this one. He reads some excerpts from his work and embroiders stories around them, smart and sensible but engaging too. Afterward, there are questions and a woman raises her hand like she’s in school. “How autobiographical is your work?” she wants to know. “Not in the slightest,” Louis replies. “My life is much too boring for that.” Cue laughter.

  When it’s over, Louis wants to have a drink with the people, “because it’s polite,” he says. An hour and a half later, we’re still there. I talk to the woman who asked the first question; she works in a store where they sell everything you need for equestrian sports. With more than average enthusiasm, she holds forth about different kinds of fodder and their advantages and disadvantages, about riding hats, of which there are more than ten different types these days. In the meantime, Louis wanders from group to group, bathing in their praise, he really needs it. The room empties out and, in the end, the one person who has made no attempt to leave is him.

  When we finally get to the car, he asks me to drive because he’s had two beers after all, and he’s a bit tired. “Nice that you came along,” he says, “evenings like this are always nice, aren’t they?” Within five minutes, he’s snoring. I turn up the radio. Who knows, it might wake him up.

  26

  “That’ll be her,” I say when we hear someone tapping on the door. Dad wanted me to put the bed as upright as possible, he refused the oxygen in his nose, the sheets had to be neatly pulled up to under his armpits, hair washed, chin shaven, aftershave on. He was even more nervous than the time before.

  First he’d refused when I said that Joanna wanted to see him. What about Marie? He couldn’t leave the hospital now. But since Marie had to lie down for at least an hour every day after lunch for her whiplash, the coast was clear, and I would keep a lookout in the hallway. We talked things through a while and then he came around. Some longings are stronger than any fear.

  When Joanna pokes her head inside, he beams. He suddenly looks healthier than over the previous days, but perhaps I’m only imagining it. I immediately go to the door to leave them alone. She gives me a kiss. She smells of roses and autumn mist.

  I’ve brought along a book, but I’m too restless on their behalf to be able to read. I look around aimlessly. There are three elderly women waiting in chairs. They’re all wearing glasses and similar skirts and blouses, like a kind of uniform for the aged. One of them has a coughing fit, holding her hand in front of her mouth. The other two stare at her like they want to intervene but are bolted to their chairs. The mouth of the one on the far left gapes a little, alarmed by the coughing, or maybe she simply forgot to close it. I don’t want to get old, I can’t help thinking, at least not like that. I wander over to the window and then back and wonder how things are going in there.

  Barely forty minutes have passed when I hear footsteps I recognize right away. I try to get a good look, someone is approaching, a skinny woman in a muted red dress. Marie has one like that. Let it not be true, not now, not her, but oh yes, I can see it’s Marie. What is she doing here now? I can’t warn Dad and Joanna, it’s too late for that. Think of an excuse, but what? Marie draws ever closer. It’s like she’s constantly clamped to my feet, pulling me down with all her weight.

  “Mona, what are you doing out here?”

  My mouth talks but my head doesn’t join in, it’s on too high a state of alert. “The nurse is busy with him—want to go get a coffee together or something?”

  “No, thank you, I’ve already had some coffee and too much gives me diarrhea if I don’t watch out.” She goes toward the door, her head too upright in the neck brace. “I’m going—”

  “You’re not allowed in, the nurse—” I say, realizing it isn’t good enough. I have to get her away from here.

  “Oh, I always stick around when they’re nursing him. I’ve had enough medical—” And then she opens the door. I waltz into the room with her. For a few seconds, there’s silence. Everyone looks at each other. Dad’s eyes fill with panic.

  “That’s Joanna,” I say, “a friend of my mother’s, of Agnes’s. I bumped into her here and when I told her about Dad, she said she wanted to come by and say hello.”

  Marie looks her up and down and then again, her lips in a thin strip. “Pleased to meet you,” she says, without proffering a hand.

  “You too. Yes, I was actually about to leave. I just wanted to—after all this time.” She smiles, slings her handbag over her shoulder, and stands up.

  “Don’t let me drive you away,” Marie says in the highest pitch I’ve ever heard her reach.

  “No, no. I’ll leave you to it.” She turns to Dad, gives him a chaste kiss on the cheek, and says, “Take care of yourself. Get well soon.” There are tiny chicks in that voice, and puppies, the softness. Then she nods to Marie and comes over to me. I’m standing near the door.

  “I’ll just accompany her out,” I say, and as that slips out, I wonder whether I can leave Dad alone with Marie now, but to do anything else now would be more suspicious, so I let Joanna pass and then close the door behind us.

  “Want to get a snack downstairs, or would you rather not? Whatever you want to do.” I see her pondering. “And I’m sorry. Since the accident, Marie hasn’t been here at all around this time, and then she had to pick—”

  “It doesn’t matter.” She rests a hand on my shoulder. “And yes, let’s pop down to that dreadful cafeteria.”

  Joanna is having a glass of beer; they only have a couple of kinds here, but she chose the darkest, a stout, which immediately endeared her to me. She isn’t a sherry-sipping old woman, she’s still very much part of the world. I just have a coffee, who knows what this day still has in store. We sit at a small table in the corner, next to the pale-green wall, at the window.

  “To Vincent,” she says, clinking her glass against my cup. She takes a few big sips, and then lets out a sigh. “I’m glad you called me.”

  “Does it upset you that—”

  “It’s terrible,” she says. “You can’t imagine how . . . He and I were so . . .” Then she falls silent. She stares at the sky outside, where birds are flying and clouds are slowly sailing by. She drinks a little more of her pint, it’s already half-empty. “Do you mind me saying that? It might be—”

  “No, on the contrary,” I hurry to say.

  “Will you take good care of him? You can do that.”

  I nod.

  “Someone needs to take good care of him,” she says, as though she’s speaking to herself, so quietly. Then she smiles at me.

  There’s so much I want to ask this woman, but everything feels so odd. I continue to stare at her bashfully. “I think my father regrets it now, that he didn’t—”

  “Regrets.” She rubs her finger and thumb along her bottom lip, the way Dad does sometimes when he’s thinking. “We get up every day, do what’s expected of us, and then go to sleep again, and we call
that life. We sabotage our lives without realizing it because we unwittingly just do the things we saw people around us do, and we assume that’s how things should be done. And in the meantime, we arrange things in a way that doesn’t give us time to stop and think about our deepest feelings. We forget what we’re worth and don’t dare believe that we genuinely deserve something good. We find it easier to come to terms with our suffering, easier to console ourselves after the pain than to opt for what really would make us happy.” She runs her hand through her hair. “Look at me ambushing you with all of this. The wisdom of an old crone, you’re thinking.” She smiles generously.

  “Not at all.” Go on, don’t stop talking.

  “You know, it’s, I’ve been thinking so much since . . .” She stares into the distance, rubs a few fingers over the palm of her hand. “We always just carry on and then we’re old, and we feel it in our joints that things aren’t actually right, that something else would have been possible if only we’d dared. But then we think it’s too late. And soon we’re secretly dreaming of dying, or of a heaven where everything turns out right. It’s such a pity, all of it, such a terrible shame.” She turns her glass in her hands, then empties it. “How old are you now?”

  “Thirty-five.”

  “Can I tell you something? You have to live well and dream harder. You have to learn to look at yourself, to ask yourself why you do what you do.” She takes both my hands in hers and smiles as though my life could still work out OK. We look at each other. “By the way, just a practical thought, I wanted to ask whether there’s a time of day I might call Vincent.”

  “After about eight, eight thirty, he’s usually alone in his room.”

  “Ask him first whether he’d like me to call, will you?”

  “I’ll do that and let you know.”

  Joanna gets to her feet and so I do too. I don’t want her to leave yet; I don’t know why I don’t want that. She hugs me, maybe because she wasn’t able to hug Dad. When she lets go, she looks like she wants to say something but then turns on her heel and walks away. I watch her go for as long as I can.

  When I go back into Dad’s room, Marie is telling him something about the neighbor’s daughter. Dad is dozing off because he’s tired and about to fall asleep, or because he doesn’t want to suggest any kind of exaggerated awareness of things. It’s hard to guess. When I go in, he shoots a peevish glance in my direction, then closes his eyes again.

  After a while, Marie asks, “So you just happened to run into that woman?”

  “Yes, I recognized her when I was buying a newspaper downstairs. Some people don’t change at all, even though it’s been years.”

  “Hmm,” Marie says. “And why wasn’t I supposed to see her?”

  “Well, everything that’s got to do with my real mom, I mean Agnes, it’s always been a bit of a sensitive subject, right?”

  “You always act like it is, but I never say anything about it.”

  “Well, in any case, it was stupid of me. I’m sorry.”

  “Lying is always wrong and the truth will out.” Marie looks at my father, who is keeping his eyes shut. My mother always used to say that too. “And Daddy didn’t mind seeing her.”

  “Um, sure?”

  “While he always tries to get rid of the rest of us as fast as he can.” She talks as though he’s not present; Dad continues to act like he isn’t.

  “I might have forced him into it a bit. I thought it would be nice for him, after all this time, a different face. I didn’t really think.”

  Marie picks up her knitting.

  “Sorry,” I say again, just to be sure. “And she was here for less than fifteen minutes.”

  “Right.” Marie sticks the knitting needles under her armpits. The back of the sweater she is making for Dad is almost done.

  27

  When they bring him back, Dad’s face is ashen. He lies there not moving, groggy, an animal who has been transported in a dark box all day and is now adjusting to daylight again.

  “Was it a little bit bearable?”

  “No,” he says, sighing deeply, which he seldom does. My father doesn’t believe in sighing, just like he doesn’t believe in hope—or faith, I think. I should ask him sometime.

  “The needle was this big, and they sucked out all the fluid with it. There was a lot, the doctor said.” He swallows, loudly. “I hope you never have to go through that.” He grimaces in a way that worries me.

  “But you feel better now?”

  “Breathing’s easier, yes.”

  “Get a bit more sleep, maybe.”

  “The waiting’s the worst. They leave you lying in a hallway where anyone might walk past, and the sheet was too thin, I was cold, and I was worried the bag would get too full.” These days he refers directly to his colostomy bag, calling it simply “the bag.” “I’m not wearing a watch, how long was I there?”

  “You’ve been gone almost two hours.”

  “Why do they do that to a person?” His voice breaks. He takes a sip of water. “I think I will take a nap. Will you tell Marie it turned out better than expected?”

  “Why? It didn’t.”

  “And you think Marie knowing that would be helpful to me in any way?” He lets out a wheezy laugh, somewhere between disbelief and astonishment, then closes his eyes and turns his sallow face a little. “Thank you, dearest daughter.” Then he opens them again briefly. “By the way, she called me last night. Thank you for passing on the message.” He smiles broadly.

  Within a few minutes, his snores are whistling away. I wish I could take him away from here to a place where lives are long and wide and the sun glitters on seas and nights remain blessedly warm.

  As I drive away, I think about Dad and about Dad and Joanna, about the days as they are, what lies behind and ahead of us and everything that slips away. I turn up the music and croon along with Andy Williams, “Moon River.”

  28

  This isn’t shouting, it’s barking. In a few days we’ll move to the theater to put the production together. There’s been no progress, as far as I’m concerned, but no one’s asking me. I’ve never felt so painfully redundant. Nathan has just performed his long monologue; he did it just as he has done over the past days. Then Marcus hadn’t commented, now he goes ballistic. The others look on in shock, even Elise bites her cuticles, a habit she’s trying to quit. When he’s finished with his tirade, Marcus sits down on a chair, cross-legged as usual, sunglasses on top of his head, and says nothing for a while.

  No one dares to speak, until Nathan himself starts up. “Maybe it would be a good idea if I—”

  Marcus interrupts him, icily calm all of sudden. “Quit, left this production. Yes, that’s an idea, yes. I’ve been thinking about it for a few days now, perhaps Frank can take over your role. I’ll have to talk with the PR and planning people, whether we can delay the premiere for a week or maybe two even, but it can’t go on like this.” He holds a hand in front of his face, an elbow on the table as though he’s the victim.

  Nathan looks like he doesn’t know whether to laugh or shout, amazement’s two ports of refuge. Elise knew nothing about this, based on the way she’s staring at Marcus. The young actors stare at their shoes and their cups of coffee and their scripts, anywhere as long as it’s not at Nathan or Marcus. Even Frank looks uncomfortable.

  I observe the tableau. All these people, dedicating their lives to art, Marcus in the lead, and the result: Nasty situations like this one? Toying maliciously with a man who hasn’t done anything wrong?

  I straighten my shoulders and say, just as calmly as Marcus, “You can’t do this.”

  He emerges from behind his hand and turns his goading eyes on me.

  “Blaming something on an actor when it has nothing to do with him, and forcing another young man to learn his role in three weeks. It’s going too far.” It rolls out of my mouth and I sit there staring at it, as though I’m not actually present myself, not really.

  Marcus gives me a penetrating
look. “It might be to your credit that you’re defending your admirer, but the fact you can’t see that Nathan is lowering the standard doesn’t say much for your skills as a dramaturge.”

  “Maybe it’s time you admitted you no longer know what to do.” I keep my eyes fixed on him.

  Marcus paces up and down, pushes his hair behind his ear at least five times. “What do you want, Mona? For me to kick you out as well? Is that it? For me to finally admit what you really are: a girl who sits there quietly being intellectually correct, while all the rest of us are doing the real artistic work? What do you know about making theater, at the end of the day?” Marcus has always known exactly where to strike to hurt somebody; despite everything, he’s an excellent observer. “You’ve got no part in this production anymore anyway. And let’s return to this conversation, once all the rave reviews have been published.”

  No one speaks. Nathan lays a hand on my shoulder. I gather my things; Nathan begins to do the same. I leave; he follows. It isn’t until we’re outside that what I’ve done and what the possible consequences might be really sink in. Nathan suggests we go drink whiskey or something. I’m not sure that’s the best plan now. I withdraw and call Louis. He says we’ll go out and eat together, he wants to hear the whole story. Then I calm down a bit.

  29

  Anne-Sophie wanted to go straight to the hospital from the airport. She didn’t say why it had taken her so long to come. I didn’t want to bring it up myself, didn’t want to subject her to a barrage of questions; it must shake you up a bit, returning to your home country after all that time away.

  We stand outside the door to his room, her face as blank as white paper, arms crossed. She taps the nose of her sneakers on the floor, each in turn, like a runner warming up for a race. She looks good: deeply tanned, hair fairly long, blond again, no longer dyed, tied up loosely, muscled arms, weathered hands. She’s not wearing any makeup like she used to. She looks a lot older than when she left, more adult. She’s one of those girls who is intriguing because she’s so hard to read.