Chapter Three
“… Hello, Stanley,” Lucy recited. “Here I am, all freshly bathed and scented, and feeling like a brand new human being!”
But instead of delivering the next line in his Stanley Kowalski voice and his menacing Stanley Kowalski slouch, Jack Halloran broke out of character and became her coach again. “No, look, dear,” he said. “Let me try to explain something. We know the audience has to suspect from the start that Blanche is gonna go crazy; otherwise they’ll never believe the final curtain. But I’m getting a little afraid you’re gonna make her go crazy too soon. When you let hysteria come up into your face and your voice that way, you’re robbing us of a lot of tension and suspense. You’re kind of giving the whole show away, if you see what I mean.”
“Well, of course I see, Jack,” she said. “It’s just that I wasn’t aware of any – hysteria, that’s all.”
“Well, I may not have put it very well, but that’s the idea. And another thing. We know Blanche hates Stanley; she’s revolted by everything about him, and you’ve got that part of it right. But beneath the surface – unconsciously, or against her will – she’s attracted to him. It’s only an undercurrent, but it’s gotta be in there if it’s gonna pay off later. And I know you’re aware of all this, baby, but the point is I don’t think you’ve quite established it yet. Now, these next few lines are important, where she asks him to button up the back of her dress. And I don’t want to see just a mockery of flirtation, the way you read it last time; I want to see at least a subtle element of real – you know – of real flirtation in there, too.”
And all Lucy could do was tell him she would try. It was the third or fourth afternoon of their coaching sessions and she seemed to be losing confidence with each day, rather than gaining it. She had come to dread the very smell of the stage.
“… Would you think it possible,” she asked, a few lines later in the same scene, “that I was once considered to be – attractive?”
“Your looks are okay.”
“I was fishing for a compliment, Stanley.”
“I don’t go in for that stuff.”
“What stuff?”
“Compliments to women about their looks.” Jack knew every nuance of the Stanley Kowalski role; he had played it in summer stock before. “I never met a woman that didn’t know if she was good-looking or not without being told, and some of them give themselves credit for more than they’ve got. I once went out with a doll who said to me ‘I am the glamorous type, I am the glamorous type.’ I said ‘So what?’ ”
“And what did she say then?”
“She didn’t say nothing. That shut her up like a clam.”
“Did it end the romance?”
“It ended the conversation – that was all.…”
“Jack, I don’t think this is going to work,” she told him as they climbed the driveway in the brilliant orange sunset of their last afternoon. “I don’t see how I can possibly—”
“Look, I made a promise, didn’t I?” And he slung one arm around her waist. Whenever he did that it made her feel safe and important. “I promised you that if I didn’t think you could handle the part I’d tell you so. Well, listen, it’s gonna be all right. Maybe there’re still a couple of rough spots, but just wait. Tomorrow we’ll have Julie and all the others working with us, and you’ll begin to see what a difference real rehearsals can make. The play’ll carry us along in its own momentum – make us all better than we thought we could be – and by opening night we’ll have it licked.”
“Is – Julie going to play Stella Kowalski, then?”
“Well, I kind of halfway tried to talk her out of it, because I know how tired she is, but she kept saying she’d rather work than rest. So I pretended to be very reluctant – and I mean it’s true that I’ve been concerned about her nerves and everything – but in the end I said okay. And of course I’m delighted to have her. Julie’s the kind of performer who can hold a whole show together with her bare hands.”
That was the evening that Michael called up again, just before dinnertime. Laura answered the phone – “Hi, Daddy!” – and talked to him in a happy, chattering way for a few minutes before she covered the mouthpiece and handed the phone to Lucy. “He wants to talk to you, Mom. He sounds all better.”
“Well, that’s fine,” Lucy told her. “Now, why don’t you run along upstairs, dear, in case there are things Daddy and I need to discuss in private.”
“What kind of things?”
“Well, I don’t know; you know; grown-up things. Just go on upstairs, okay?”
Then she took up the phone and said “Hello, Michael. I’m – really glad you’re out of that place.”
“Good,” he said. “Thanks. Still, I wonder if you have any idea what that particular place is like.”
“Oh, I think I sort of do. I think anyone who’s lived in New York has heard about Bellevue.”
“Yeah, well, okay, except that Bellevue’s about twenty-nine times worse than anyone who’s lived in New York can possibly imagine. Never mind, though; I’m out. I’m all scrubbed down with antilice soap, delousing soap, and I’m on what they call an outpatient basis now – it’s kind of like being on parole. I’ve gotta go back there once a week to get ‘therapy’ from some pompous little Guatemalan asshole in a purple suit. Oh, and I’ve got pills, too. I’ve got more different kinds of pills than you ever saw. And they’re wonderful things, these pills: they keep your brains working even after your mind is dead.”
She knew it was a mistake to let him go on this way – he was talking as if she were still his wife – but she didn’t know what to say that would make him stop.
“No, but the worst part of all this,” he said, “is what it’s done to my record.”
“Your ‘record’? What record is that?” And she was instantly sorry she’d asked.
“Oh, Jesus, Lucy, don’t be dense. Everybody in America’s got a record – the FBI files are only one small part of it – and there’s no hiding from it. There’s no escaping it, ever. Oh, I imagine my record’ll start out nicely enough, with stuff about Morristown and the Air Force and Harvard; then there’ll be stuff about you and Laura, and about Chain Store Age and all the published poems – and I mean even the divorce’ll look okay in there, because nobody cares about that kind of thing. But then all of a sudden: Whammo. It’ll say ‘Psychotic Episode, August, nineteen sixty.’ There’ll be some New York City policeman’s signature, or his badge number, because it was the cops that brought me in, and there’ll be some Bellevue flunky’s signature too; and then, dear God, there’ll be the signature of William fucking Brockconcerned citizen, guardian of the public health and morals – because he’s the son of a bitch who committed me. Oh, Lucy, don’t you see what I’m saying? I’m a certified lunatic. I’ll be a certified lunatic for the rest of my life.”
“I think you’re still very tired,” she said, “and I don’t think you really believe any of the crazy things you’re saying.”
“Wanna bet?” he asked her. “Wanna bet?”
“I want to get off the phone now,” she told him, “before Laura starts worrying again. This hasn’t been an easy time for her. But first I want to tell you something. I’m only going to say this once, so listen carefully. From now on, when you call Laura, don’t ask to speak to me. Because if you do I’ll refuse, and then we’ll both be hurting Laura in a wholly unnecessary way. Is that clear?”
“But there are things that happen between a man and a woman in the dark,” said Julie Pierce in the role of Stella, “that sort of make everything else seem – unimportant.”
“What you are talking about,” said Lucy Davenport in the role of Blanche, “is brutal desire – just – Desire! – the name of that rattle-trap streetcar that bangs through the Quarter, up one old narrow street and down another.”
“Haven’t you ever ridden on that streetcar?”
“It brought me here,” Lucy said. “– Where I’m not wanted and where I’m ashamed to be.”
“Then don’t you think your superior attitude is a bit out of place?”
“I am not being or feeling at all superior, Stella. Believe me I’m not. It’s just this. This is how I look at it. A man like that is someone to go out with – once – twice – three times, when the devil is in you. But live with? Have a child by?”
“I have told you I love him.”
“Then I tremble for you. I just – tremble for you.… He acts like an animal, has an animal’s habits! Eats like one, moves like one, talks like one! There’s even something – subhuman … Yes, something apelike about him.… Thousands and thousands of years have passed him right by, and there he is – Stanley Kowalski – survivor of the Stone Age! Bearing the raw meat home from the kill in the jungle! And you – you here – waiting for him …”
“Okay,” Jack Halloran called. “I think we can knock off now. Tomorrow we’ll pick it up from Scene Five. Hey, Julie?”
“Yes, Jack?”
“You’re really doing fine in there.”
But he said nothing at all to Lucy, even when they were alone and plodding up the lumpy driveway together, slow with fatigue. He didn’t put his arm around her, either.
“Well, so did you qualify?” Nancy Smith had asked her brother. And he’d said “No, but it didn’t matter. In the end they faked-up the scores and qualified everybody.”
Late that night they sat fully clothed on the edge of Jack’s bed for what seemed a long time, as if each were waiting for the other to make the first move toward getting undressed.
“Know something, dear?” he said. “You might be able to learn a lot just from watching Julie work.”
“Oh? Well, I – how do you mean?”
“Well, it’s her whole – her whole performance. Notice her timing. She’s never off by so much as half a beat. And notice how she understands the stage. She never looks lost on the stage except when the play calls for her to look lost; then she knows how to look lost as hell. I mean she’s the kind of actress you find once in a – I don’t know; once in a long while. She’s the real thing.”
And I’m not, Lucy wanted to say. And I’ll never be, and you know it, and all you’re doing is using me in this play. You’re using me and using me, and I hate you. I hate you. But all she said was “Well, I’ll try to pay closer attention to her, then, in what little – what little time we have left.”
They seemed to have hardly any time left at all – and with each rapidly vanishing day, right up into the dress rehearsal, Jack kept after her about what he called the hysteria in her face and voice.
“No, dear,” he would say, coming quickly out of his Stanley Kowalski role. “You’re still a little shrill in there – a little unbalanced. You’ll have to try for more control in this speech, Lucy. You’ll have to try for control as hard as Blanche Dubois is trying, okay? Okay. Let’s take it again.”
But a couple of hours before curtain time, on opening night, he walked into her house and kissed her in a way that suggested an impending triumph.
“Know what we’re gonna do?” he said. “You and me?” And he ceremoniously pulled a bottle of bourbon out of a paper bag. “We’re gonna have a drink. I think we’ve both earned this, don’t you?”
And it might have been the whiskey, or it might have been that what Jack had promised about the momentum of the play came true for her at last, but Lucy made her way through that opening night with an authority she could never have foreseen. She was almost sure her face and voice didn’t once betray hysteria too soon; she knew she established just the right blend of mock and real flirtation in the subtle early scene with Stanley; and she couldn’t help noticing, if only with part of her mind, how tame and modest Julie Pierce’s performance came to seem beside her own. Julie’s role was secondary, after all: if anyone was going to hold this show together with her bare hands, it would have to be Lucy Davenport herself.
At certain quiet moments – times, for instance, when the play called for her to look lost on the stage – she would catch herself wondering if the Nelsons or the Maitlands, or all of them, might be in the audience. And she’d try to rid herself quickly of such thoughts – no real actress would let her attention drift like that – but she’d go on wondering anyway. She could almost feel their presence out there, two couples seated in separate parts of the darkness because they were strangers to each other – her “friends”; the people whose lives had changed her own. And if they had pitied her for years, as an unhappy wife and a poor little rich girl, then let them all sit back and take a look at her now.
She had a high, clear sense of doing everything right, and nobody could say she wasn’t doing it alone. It was Lucy Davenport alone who brought Blanche Dubois from neurasthenia and self-delusion into terror; and at last, with the final scene of the play, it was Lucy Davenport alone who set her adrift in madness of a kind no audience in the world could fail to believe, or fail to care about, or ever forget.
The thunderclap of applause became a long ovation that went on and on as the supporting actors gathered at the footlights to take their curtain calls. Lucy was crying, but she managed to stop at once – managed to arrange her face into a look of shyness and courtesy – when the moment came for her to walk out with Jack and stand there alone with him under the rising curtain. He clasped and held her hand as if to suggest to the crowd that they were really in love, and there was a renewal and swelling of applause that continued long after the curtain had fallen for the last time – people seemed to be calling for one more look at the two of them holding hands.
But Jack was already hurrying her through the dimly lighted bustle and disorder backstage.
“You were good, Lucy,” he said as he steered her carefully around a tall stepladder, heading for an outside door. “You did well.” And that was all he said until they were out across the road and walking up the driveway, guided by the weak and wavering beam of his flashlight.
“There were – a couple of problems,” he began. “Well, really only one problem.”
“Jack,” she said, “if you start talking about ‘hysteria’ again, I honestly don’t think I’ll be able to—”
“No, that part was okay. You had good control on that tonight. This is nothing specific; it’s more of a general thing. And it’s more important.”
His arm was around her, but it didn’t bring much comfort. “What I’m getting at,” he said, “is that your whole performance tonight was – stagey. You were acting almost as if none of the rest of us were there. You kept kind of upstaging everybody else, all the way through, and the point is that’s never a good idea because it shows. The audience can see it.”
“Oh.” And it may not have been the first time in her life that she’d felt shame all over her skin and deep inside her, too, crawling in her bowels – there must surely have been other such times in childhood, or in college, or even in the years since then – but it seemed now that never before had she fully understood the meaning of the word. This was shame. “Oh,” she said again, and then in a small voice she said “So I made a fool of myself.”
“Ah, Lucy, come on, I didn’t mean anything like that,” he told her. “Listen, it’s no big deal. This happens all the time with beginners. Having a real audience out there is sort of intoxicating, and it makes a lot of people want to be ‘stars,’ you see, before they’ve learned to work with other actors. All you have to remember, dear, is that the theater is a communal enterprise. Hey, listen: whaddya say we go to your place and get some more of that good whiskey. That’ll pick you up.”
And they sat drinking in the living room for half an hour, but it didn’t make the shame go away.
Lucy wasn’t sure if her voice would work, but she tried it. “And I suppose Julie Pierce was the one who minded all my ‘upstaging’ the most?” she inquired.
“Nah, nah, Julie’s a pro,” he said. “She’ll always understand this kind of thing. Besides, I don’t think anybody ‘minded’ anything, dear. We all like you, and we’re proud of you
. You came in out of nowhere and learned an extremely difficult part, and you brought it off. I think you’ll find ordinary people are nicer than you give them credit for being, Lucy – probably nicer than you’ve ever let yourself believe.”
But her mind was far away, thinking of people who weren’t so ordinary.
“Well, sure she hammed it up,” Tom Nelson might well be saying to his wife as they went about their preparations for bed, “and sure she was embarrassing. Still, isn’t it good that she’s finally got something to do? And isn’t it nice that she’s fixed up with what’s-his-name? The guy that runs the show?”
And in another, very different house, Paul Maitland might be fingering his mustache with a small, devilish smile as he said “What’d you think of Lucy?”
Then Peggy would say, “Yuck,” and “Squaresville, man,” and “Emotional City,” and whatever other cool little disparagements she’d managed to pick up, along with her dirndl skirts and her gypsy friends, in her time as a child of bohemia.
“Would it be helpful,” Jack said, “if I try to give you a few pointers about tomorrow night?”
“No. Please. I don’t think I can bear any more pointers.”
“Well, hell, I probably exaggerated the whole thing. I’d never’ve said anything if I’d known it’d make you feel so bad. Listen, though, Lucy. Can I tell you just one more thing?”
He came over to her chair and took her chin in his hand, tilting it up to make her look into his remarkably good-looking face. “None of this matters,” he told her, and he winked. “Do you understand? None of it matters at all. It’s only a dumb little summer-stock theater that nobody ever heard of. Okay?”
He let go of her face then and said “Feel like coming on up to the – up to the dorm with me?” And the hesitation in his voice told her at once that he wouldn’t care if she said no.
“I don’t think so, Jack; not tonight.”
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