Acts of Love (11 page)

His fatigue had vanished. It was late, but he felt fine. Plenty of time for a few more, he thought, and, reaching into the box he pulled out a handful of letters and settled back to read.

Jessica Fontaine in
Anna Christie
mesmerized an opening night audience at the Helen Hayes Theatre last night as has no one else since Constance Bernhardt played Anna almost forty years ago.

The newspaper clipping had fallen out of the letter and Luke read it first.

It is rare that an actor totally inhabits the
space
of a character: a past history, hints of a future, quirks and eccentricities, mannerisms, a way of moving across the stage as if it is the whole world. Great actors do this without intellectualizing it; they get “out of their head,” if you will, and into that mysterious well of the instinct that draws on some kind of inner magic and on a lifetime of experience. Jessica Fontaine is too young to have a lot of experience—she turned twenty-five a week before
Anna Christie
opened—and she is still untried in many roles, but she has that inner magic and she is wondrous to watch. I predict we'll be watching her a lot, from now on.

Dearest Constance, how wonderful you were to call last night—opening night! I felt you beside me while I waited to go on; I was so scared I was shaking and my legs felt heavy and rubbery but I started saying over and over what you'd said on the phone—that
you're
so nervous you feel sick every time before making your first entrance—and I repeated it without stopping—Constance gets nervous, too; Constance gets nervous, too—until I almost hypnotized myself with it and actually began to feel better. I could really hear you talking to me and feel your hand on my arm and you stayed with me all through the play, even at the curtain calls . . . there were
fourteen
, can you believe it? I have so much to tell you, but I can't write a long letter today because we have to work on the second act to tighten it up, but I promise I'll write as soon as things settle down. I just wanted you to know that I'm grateful for you, always, and I love you. Jessica.

Why didn't I see her in that play? Luke wondered. He thought back. She was twenty-five, so I was thirty—and that was the year Claudia and I spent in San Francisco while I was directing at the Berkeley Rep. We saw Constance out there when she was playing in
The Visit
in Los Angeles, and the three of us took some weekend trips until Claudia got bored and then Constance and I went by ourselves, as far north as the Olympic Peninsula, as far south as Baja. We were away from New York for almost two years; I went to Los Angeles to direct another play and then Claudia and I went to London to see Constance open in
Oedipus,
and then Paris. So Jessica had her triumph without Constance. But Constance called. A loving friend.

Dearest Constance, thank you so much for your telephone call last night and I do apologize; how could I let four months go by without writing to you? Maybe it's because I think of you all the time, and talk to you inside my head, so perhaps I think I've written when in fact I haven't. But now here I am on my way to London—and you! Do you know how I've dreamed of this—to be in another play with you, to
work
with you, to learn from you . . . I am so incredibly excited I can't begin to describe it. I'll just call it paradise. My paradise: playing Vivie Warren to your Kitty Warren. Playing your daughter, even though there's not much daughterly feeling in the whole play. What a wonderful time we'll have! Oh, one thing, you'll meet Terence in London. I wrote to you about him; he's the producer who kept wandering around backstage. We've been going out since
Anna
closed and he's really quite nice. His name is Terence Alban (and woe to the person who calls him Terry!) and he's from Dublin and London and Cape Town, but even after all that moving around and some pretty sophisticated living he's still unbelievably timid about a lot of things, including me. I have to urge him on now and then, even (especially!) in intimate moments. It's not that he doesn't know what to do or how to do it, it's just that he can't believe anyone would truly be attracted to him and he really believes it's better not to try than to find out someone doesn't want him. So after a while
I
kissed
him
and undid his tie (what a curious reversal of roles; it made me feel quite different about everything), and then I made a few casual suggestions and eventually we progressed to his bedroom (we were in his living room at the time, overlooking all of Central Park under a full moon . . . so very beautiful, but I thought if I commented on it Terence would think he was a failure because my attention was wandering, so I didn't mention it) . . . well, please forgive this peculiar sentence; it seems to be wandering all over the place . . . so we got to his bedroom—

Luke looked up from the letter. He felt uncomfortable: a voyeur pawing through letters meant only for his grandmother's eyes. But he was angry, too. Why couldn't she see through Terence Alban? Luke had known Alban for a long time; they'd met through Monte Gerhart and Alban had put money into two of Luke's productions. He'd been hanging around the theater for years: too much money, too much time, nothing to do but get his kicks by attaching himself to famous people. He wasn't good enough for Jessica; all he had was a fake, cloying insecurity that made women want to stroke him and build him up. Bringing out the mother in all of them, Luke thought contemptuously; you'd think she'd be too smart to be taken in by that.

Time for bed, he thought, and stuffed the letters back in the box. But their crushed mass made him feel guilty, thinking of the care his grandmother had taken with them, folding each one and lining it up perfectly with all the others, so he pulled them out again and smoothed them on his knee. A few fell to the floor and he picked them up and spread them out on the coffee table and, in so doing, once again began to read.

The only thing wrong with the past year, dearest Constance, was that you and I didn't write to each other. But in every other way it was absolutely the most perfect year of my life. First of all, being on stage with you, watching the miracle of your transformation into Mrs. Warren, and feeling my own strength increase because of yours. I think daughters in real life must feel like that when their mothers are people they truly long to grow into. I wonder how often that happens. I loved my mother but I never wanted to be her, while I've wanted to be you ever since the day we met. When you and I work together, I have a feeling of great power . . . well, actually I have it all the time I'm on stage, but it's even greater when I'm with you. We've talked about this but now I'm truly beginning to understand it: the feeling that we can do anything when we slip into one character and then another—young girl to middle-aged woman to old woman, prostitute to suburban matron, schoolgirl to royalty—and then, when we take our curtain calls and hear the applause and see all those smiles and bright faces in the audience, we know we've brought them with us,
we've made them believe in us.
I can't imagine more power than that, and nothing in the world gives me so much joy, such a feeling of freedom, as if I'd learned to fly and now I soar over everything and there's nowhere I can't go, nothing I can't do.

But you're part of that, and the most perfect moment of this perfect year was the last curtain call of our final performance when you took my hand and the two of us stood alone on stage, and the whole audience was standing, and their applause wrapped around us in a huge roaring embrace, and when the curtain finally came down and stayed down you said, “You and I, dearest Jessica, are much more together than either of us is alone; we enhance each other. I am very grateful for that.” But
I'm
the one who is grateful and I thank you with all my heart for saying that. I will never forget it.

Of course part of what made me happy in London was Larry, as long as it lasted. It was very strange to be in a play opposite someone I was having an affair with, and I was very mournful when it ended—I liked him a lot and we had fun together and I couldn't understand why he kept insisting that we get married. Why couldn't he just have a good time and be happy, the way I was? Oh, dear, what a lot of quarrels we had when we could have been making love and laughing. Such a shame.

When Terence came back from New York I put him off as long as I could, but after a month I ran out of reasons for not going out with him, so we started up again, only I couldn't go to bed with him because I was still, in a way, mourning Larry and missing him, and that drove Terence crazy; he slid back to thinking he wasn't worth anything and after a while I got awfully tired of all the stroking he needed, the bucking-up, the
mothering,
so I broke that off, too.

This all happened a week ago, after you'd left for Sydney and I was wishing that I could have stowed away in your luggage. Instead, I'm going to Hollywood, to make a movie, and the next time you hear from me I'll be sitting in some house in Malibu (never been there, but the studio rented it for me), missing you, missing the stage. I cannot imagine working without the driving energy of an audience. You said you got used to playing to the camera and to the other actors. Did you really, or were you saying that to encourage me to try it? More soon; I love you; Jessica.

Luke leafed through the next letters.

Dearest Constance, I know you're right and I should be grateful that
my
reviews were all good, but you know as well as I do that the worst thing in the world is to be part of something that everyone hates. You know how much
I
hated it; you probably got sick of hearing me tell you. Oh, I am so angry! I've never been part of a failure before and it doesn't matter that the reviews said I was good; I feel tainted by that film.

**** It's an hour later now. How wonderful everything is! All it took was one telephone call to change everything. Edward Courier just called!
The
Edward Courier, asking me if I'd be interested in reading for
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf
opposite Constance Bernhardt! Would I be interested! Good heavens, what a question! So if they like the way I read, we'll be together again, in New York, in about six months—oh, I could sing a Hallelujah for that! In the meantime I've been asked to work with a repertory company in Los Angeles and that's wonderful experience, so I'll stay in the Malibu house, which is very beautiful and I love living on the ocean.

By the way, Larry showed up the other day and we had a very romantic reunion. I was surprised at how glad I was to see him, and he says he won't talk about marriage, so maybe we'll have as good a time here as we had in London. Maybe he finally understands what I've been trying to tell him: that I can't separate me—who I am and what I am and what I want to be ten, twenty, thirty years in the future—from the theater. I want to be the absolute best, but I want more than that: I want to do good in the theater. If I have this gift—this power you and I feel on stage—then I can help people by bringing plays to life so that maybe they can understand things they couldn't understand before. I read the other day that theater exposes our internal feelings so we can
see
them instead of having them just flutter around inside us. If I can help people understand their feelings, that's better than anything, isn't it: to do good while you're doing the thing you love best?

Well, that's what I've been trying to explain to Larry. I think he finally understands it, though now and then he pretends we've never talked about it. He's staying with me in the Malibu house, which is strange, because I'm used to living alone, but he wanted to be here and I said we'd see how it worked out. So far it's okay; in fact, a lot of the time it's rather pleasant.

Larry, Luke thought. Who the hell is he? On the bookshelves at the other end of the library he found a thick volume and opened it to the index. They were together in
Mrs. Warren's Profession,
he mused, so he would have been Frank Gardner, Vivie Warren's suitor. He turned to the page listing the play's history. In the New York production fifteen years ago, Mrs. Kitty Warren had been played by Constance Bernhardt, Vivie Warren by Jessica Fontaine and Frank Gardner by Lawrence Swain.

Oh, for Christ's sake. Larry Swain. He's not good enough for her.

Larry Swain. Muscular, handsome, with those classic good looks that seemed to belong in books on Greek sculpture more than in the everyday world. A good actor, not exceptional, but good enough for television, which was what he'd been doing for the past ten years or more. And he was known to be smart, with a pretty good wit, though not exceptionally smart, or exceptionally witty. In fact, Luke thought, he wasn't exceptional at anything. And Jessica Fontaine deserved someone who was exceptional in every way.
Why does she keep choosing men who aren't half as good as she is?

He glanced at the letter beneath the one he had been reading. Too long for tonight, he told himself, and was about to return it to the box when he saw, on the second page, his own name. There was no way he could put off reading about himself. He poured another glass of cognac and once again settled back to read, starting, this time, on the second page.

. . . people at the opening night party were so amusing, all of them looking intense and holding forth with lots of eight-syllable words—the more the better!—to sound profound about what the play really meant. I wish people could just relax and enjoy the world and take from it what is important to them without always having to analyze it. I was glad to meet your grandson at long last—I've been reading about him. I like his looks—not especially handsome; he reminds me of a hawk who soars miles above the earth and isn't especially interested in coming down for a more intimate look. Strong, though, and intelligent, and his eyes are very sexy, or would be, is my guess, if they ever warmed up. He and I didn't spend much time together; there were too many people wanting to talk to me about the play, and everybody was all keyed up, waiting for the first reviews. Anyway, I got the feeling that Luke was very . . . oh, prickly, I guess . . . does he seem that way to you? He didn't seem warm or at all interested in me; in fact, for a while I thought he was like the worst of the directors I've known: aloof, observing the rest of us, being critical—the hawk again! But then I thought there was more going on inside him: he seemed angry or frustrated or maybe just wary. He wasn't open and giving, at least to me, the way you are, and I guess I expected him to be more like you in every way. I'm sure he came to the party just to see you; I couldn't see any other reason for him to be there.