Stages
Stages
By Donald Bowie
Copyright 2015 by Donald Bowie
Cover Copyright 2015 by Untreed Reads Publishing
Cover Design by Ginny Glass
The author is hereby established as the sole holder of the copyright. Either the publisher (Untreed Reads) or author may enforce copyrights to the fullest extent.
Previously published in print, 1987.
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Also by Donald Bowie and Untreed Reads Publishing
Cable Harbor
Station Identification: Confessions of a Video Kid
The Cast of
Stages
Melanie…
She survived by making commercials, until love lured her into the dissolute world of a rock and roll band. But when the party was brutally over, a sudden inheritance gave her a new shot at
fame….
Lauren…
A tall, unapproachable beauty, awakened by an older man’s lust. Her husband’s wealth was staggering, but she really needed his love—and her undying dreams of
Broadway….
Paula…
Despite her classic looks and singular talent, auditions left her dry-mouthed and shaking, staring in terror at the stage door….
Mike…
From sizzling Greenwich Village nights to the hushed, expectant silence of Off-Broadway theaters, he was a lover, a warrior, a prince, a fool—anything but himself….
David…
As a high-powered movie producer, he was the first to taste L.A.’s success. But a rival’s revenge sent him spinning out of control….
Kathy…
Once she shared David’s bed and his ambitions. How she poured her passion into a dangerous new cause—and only a heartbreaking betrayal would set her free….
Stages
Donald Bowie
Prologue
To All Members of the Footlights Society:
As you surely know by now, the highlight of this year’s graduation week will be the dedication of the new, ten-million-dollar Wilson Center for the Performing Arts. We Footlighters who are still undergraduates are especially grateful to those Society alumni whose generous contributions helped to make the Center possible, and we hope to see as many of them as can make it here during the week of June tenth, which will be an occasion to celebrate for us all.
We’re thrilled to be able to announce that Veronica Simmons will be postponing work on her new film for a few days in order to accept the honorary degree that the college is awarding her. We have asked her to talk to us informally at the Center the day before graduation, which she has very kindly agreed to do.
We know that it will be especially enjoyable for those of you who worked with Miss Simmons as undergraduates to see her again now that she’s one of Hollywood’s biggest stars, an Academy Award winner, and, needless to say, the Footlights Society’s most famous member.
Please make your reservations early for the banquet following the dedication.
And please make a special note of this: due to Miss Simmons’ enormous popularity, admission to her talk at the Center must be by ticket only.
We are allowing two tickets for each member of the Society who will be attending the graduation week ceremonies. Sorry, but we can’t make any exceptions. So get all your reservations in soon!
Yours in the Business,
Julie Axelrode,
Secretary
Copies of this letter were sent to the four hundred and thirty-one members of the Footlights Society for whom the college had current addresses.
One of those addresses was a loft building in lower Manhattan; an actor’s workshop had recently opened on the fifth floor of this building. The managing director was a woman of forty who could have passed for thirty. From the look of her clothes, you might imagine that gypsies had stolen her and kept her in a painted wagon for a few years, hidden from the aging process. She wore bandannas and Indian shawls embroidered with tiny mirrors and a large round earring in one ear.
The morning the invitation from the Footlights Society arrived, the workshop’s mail had not been picked up. Its managing director had spent five exhausting hours getting a twenty-two-year-old, apple-cheeked lacrosse player just out of college to be believable, to himself and a dozen other young actors, as the consumptive Edmund in
Long Day’s Journey.
It was six-thirty that evening before she’d thought of the mail.
As she rode up alone in the wooden freight elevator sorting her letters, she saw one from the school. The college she’d graduated from nearly twenty years before. Assuming they were looking for money again, she opened that envelope last.
Yours in the business,
she thought.
Oh, come on. Give me a break.
She laughed out loud. Veronica Simmons! And that line, “due to Miss Simmons’ enormous popularity…”
Oh, brother.
She had known Veronica Simmons by another name. She, and the rest of them.
She wondered if any of them would bother to show up.
Suddenly, she realized that
she
would.
Why the hell not?
Standing by one of her loft’s big windows, she watched the sun setting over the Hudson River. A tugboat plowed stolidly along, its bow parting the gray waters. Only a little while ago the river had been mottled with floating ice.
And only a little while ago they had all been college seniors, acting in that final production.
King Lear.
Then they’d started that long migration upstream that was being “in the business,” as Julie Axelrode would say. Little did she know.
How deep and cold the water is, how you have to push and shove and wiggle your little tail just to stay afloat.
How you have to learn to live for those few moments when everything is right with you and the world—and the waters part for you. As the curtain rises.
1
March 1967
Where they were not covered with theatrical posters, the cinder block walls of Melanie’s room looked like gallon slabs of coffee ice cream. And the single window in those walls admitted little drafts like the ones you feel when opening and closing a refrigerator.
So Melanie was doing something to warm herself up.
It was one o’clock on a Saturday morning. Sitting in her folding director’s chair, Melanie was playing strip poker with her date. And he had lost every hand but one. On her bed Melanie had stacked her winnings: a green crewneck sweater, an oxford shirt, a pair of basketball sneakers, a pair of sweat-socks, and a belt with a nautical-looking brass buckle.
A half hour ago Melanie had lost one of her black Capezios, but then she’d won it back in the next hand.
Curt, her date, who was now gambling the pockets on his ass, was the captain of the college’s swimming team. He’d met Melanie in an American literature course, while they were reading
Tender Is the Night.
The professor, whose ties and jackets were always twisted, as if he’d just emerged from a spin cycle, made Nicole Diver come alive in a way that drew Curt’s attention to Melanie: there, he thought, was a girl with the same restless sexiness, and (with luck) a capacity for booze to go with it.
He hadn’t figured her for a card sharp, though. Nor had he ever dreamed that she would be able to hold her liquor better than he.
Barefoot and bare-chested, he looked at the hand he’d drawn this time and felt chilly, embarrassed, and horny all at the same time.
He hesitated as long as he could.
He had two pairs.
Melanie had four kings.
She’d won his jeans.
Curt felt his cheeks prickling. From looking at her half-unbuttoned blue workshirt and her tongue that played around her lips as she arranged her cards, he had given himself an erection. Trying to conceal it, he stood up crookedly.
“Hey, isn’t this game about over?” he asked as he unzipped his fly.
“I dunno,” Melanie replied. “We’ll see.”
He took off his Levi’s and tossed them on the bed. There was no hiding it now. His shorts were being run up the flagpole.
“Oh,” Melanie said in obvious disappointment.
In a moment of terror for his ego, Curt thought that she meant his erection.
But then she said, “I don’t think I want to bother playing for those
boxer shorts.
The stakes aren’t high enough.”
“What are you sayin’?” Curt asked in a voice that was as shrill as a boy soprano’s.
“Oh, it’s just that I think boxer shorts are so dull,” Melanie said. “I like briefs better.”
“What’s my underwear got to do with anything?” Curt squealed.
“It’s all in the way things are served to you,” Melanie replied. “A hot dog should come in a nice pair of bun huggers—not in a bed of…cotton lettuce.”
“Why, you little…
”
“Uh-uh,” said Melanie, halting his advance with a waving finger. “There’s something I want to discuss here, first. Tell me. Those Speedos you wear when you’re swimming in a meet. Do you ever wear them on the beach?”
“No, I don’t. They’re too…
”
“Too revealing?”
“Yeah, as a matter of fact. It’s gross for guys to wear bikini bathing suits.”
“But not girls?”
Impatient and emboldened, Curt replied, “Girls don’t have nuts and a dick to stick out.”
“But they do have their boobies, don’t they?” said Melanie, sticking out her chest. “Honest to God. You
guys.
You want to see everything we’ve got, but everything you’ve got is strictly privatesville. What do we ever get to see? Two hairy legs stuck in the curtains of the Metropolitan Opera.”