Stages (2 page)

Narrowing his eyes, Curt said, “Okay, you wanna see somethin’, I’ll show ya somethin’.”

He yanked off his shorts and stood before Melanie naked, his erection batting the air like a feline paw.

Melanie said, “Now I think the poker playing is over.”

Sticking a long red fingernail inside her workshirt, she tugged, releasing her breasts, which turned outward like a show of empty hands.

Curt made his move. As he pressed his body against hers, he felt her stroking him.

“Oh. Oh God,” he moaned. “You don’t…you don’t…
go down,
do you?”

He sounded as if on every date he’d been praying for this miracle.

“You mean will I
French
you?” Melanie said. “Of course. But only if…tomorrow you go out and buy some French bikini briefs. I’m not giving head to any…Joe Palooka.”

“Oh, my God,” he murmured. “My God. Okay…okay, it’s a deal.”

*

Across the campus was a room nearly as theatrical as Melanie’s, but the posters on the walls were of campus productions in which the room’s resident had acted—except for one large poster of the Marx Brothers. That had been altered by pasting a likeness of Karl Marx over Zeppo’s face.

In the darkness the voice of a young woman was sighing, “Oh, I love your beard. It’s so
rough.
”

The young woman’s name was Amanda. She was a freshman. The senior making love to her—so
passionately,
as she would write in her diary the next day—was David Whitman.

She had loved his room almost as much as she was now loving his beard. Seeing it, she had said to him rapturously, “Are you as enchanted with the theater as I am?”

She was rubbing her cheeks against the hair on his face in as giddy a frenzy as that of a parakeet with a cuttlebone.

David kissed her, letting his tongue loll around in her mouth.

“Oh, I love your tongue,” she breathed. “Oh, it’s so rough.”

And his dick was so slick.

While he was humping her, Amanda let out little groans—with a rhythm that threw his own rhythm off.

His erection flagged a little, and fucking her became almost work. He started wondering if she sandpapered her legs instead of shaving them—for the added roughness.

After he came, after she had fallen asleep and David had gently lifted her arm off his chest, he lay there in the dark thinking.

In a few months he’d be out of school. Then what? Would he go to New York? Was he going to be able to get out of the draft? Was he going to make it as an actor? In the hallway, a door opened and closed. Then, from what seemed a great distance, came the wail of a toilet.

David was filled with a nervous energy that even when he was in bed threatened to run away with him. He had not yet learned that this restlessness, this constant anxiety, was not a product of his ambition. He hadn’t made the connection between the reasons why people go to bed together with the reasons why they go on stage—the attention, and the love.

2

David had a small but distinctly Semitic nose, a carefully trimmed black beard, and brown eyes as attentive as a cat’s. Stroking his beard, as was his habit, he inevitably created an impression of slyness, just as some people will appear contemplative when they put on eyeglasses. David was twenty-one years old, but he looked closer to thirty, and crossing the campus that burly March afternoon, his long scarf stuffed inside his Harris tweed jacket, he also looked like what he was: an actor.

A
serious
actor. Earlier in the day, while David was standing at a urinal, an idiot student politician who couldn’t relieve himself without trying to be ingratiating had said to him, “Hiya, Dave, don’t see you around much lately. You in another show?”

“We’re having tryouts for one this week,” David replied. “Riddiford has decided to do
King Lear.
”

“Shakespeare, huh?” was the response. “I suppose you’ll disappear for another couple of months. Christ, that theater’s almost a frat house for you guys. It’s a whole way of life, isn’t it?”

That observation struck David as a triumph of the obvious. And not simply because the theater was his life, which indeed it was, but because in light of the theater, everything else about college was tedious, trivial, and irrelevant.

It was ten past three now, and David was late, delayed for fifteen minutes by a boring lecture that had run overtime.

Adding to David’s outrage over the delay was the fact that he was late for a workshop at the theater, which was being conducted by a Method actor from New York. And Broadway waited for no one.

The Hubbard Theater Arts building was located at the bottom of the hill that most of the campus clung to. It was a converted gym, and it seemed like an outhouse beside the rest of the school’s architecture, which had been constructed in the typical Georgian style of academia, with ivy aspiring up the brick walls.

The school’s priorities being what they were, the Hubbard Theater had floors that creaked so badly that, during a performance, when members of the cast were backstage, they had to tiptoe about in their stocking feet.

During David’s freshman year he had heard a lot of enthusiastic talk about the new theater that was in the works, but he soon learned that this project had been rumored for the past five years. Now he was a senior, and the ground had been broken only by the frost of four winters. The same frayed green sofa was in the lounge off the lobby, as was the coffee table, a sort of wooden doormat embellished with ballpoint ink. The same battered upright piano, perpetually out of tune, stood opposite the box office.

Only the sets had changed. The theater itself was a constant, a jury-rigged hulk of beams and boards painted black in order to present, when the lights came up, the illusion of a smooth surface.

Opening the stage door, David felt, even in his haste, the familiar tingle that he’d first experienced as a freshman coming to the tryouts for
Death of a Salesman.
The theater always created in him an excitement that was almost sexual, but without sexual insecurities—something like the arousal of old sensations of warmth that he felt when he was going home for vacation.

The workshop was already in progress onstage. Quietly David took a seat. The teacher running things, whose name was Samuels, was working with Kathy Lowenthal. Kathy was short and plain, with a round chin from which, on occasion, a single coarse hair would protrude. But she had large, very expressive eyes, and full lips. In the right role she could radiate a kind of womanly beauty that came more from the heart than the appearance.

“I want you to think of the funniest thing you ever saw,” Samuels was saying, “and then I want you to laugh at it, just as if you were seeing it all over again.”

To David this Samuels character looked a little seedy and down on his luck; he appeared to be straining to get his point across, like an unconvincing salesman. Which teachers often are, David reminded himself, let alone this guy, who was pushing his limited contact with Broadway from door to door. As Samuels walked around Kathy, adjusting her gestures, David noticed that he had a limp, which was so pronounced that it had to mean a wooden leg or at the very least a brace. That explained why he was running acting workshops on the college circuit. There weren’t many roles for cripples.

In order to concentrate on the comic moment, Kathy had shut her eyes. Her face seemed to fizz like seltzer, and then her head rolled back and her mouth fell open and a great guffaw came out of her. David smiled. Titters broke out in the seats around him. He recognized Mike Lange’s laugh, which was always nervous, and Melanie Chisolm’s laugh, which always sounded like a snide remark, and Paula Rubin’s laugh, which was abraded by cigarettes, and Lauren Holland’s laugh—which went up and down David’s spine like a padded hammer on a xylophone.

During their sophomore year, David had been with Kathy for six months. He had slept with Melanie three times, and with Paula once. But he had never taken Lauren to bed, and he knew he never would. She was taller than he by three inches. Her eyes were more watchful than his, and they were intensely blue. Her thick brown hair fell almost to her waist. On her pale face there was always a thin smile. The most striking and unsettling thing about her was her voice: Lauren had a voice with grains of gold in it that sparkled against a texture as hard and gray and cold as that of slate. It was the voice of a soul deep in a crystal cave, and onstage, it carried, to say the least.

Lauren’s only physical flaw was a separation between two of her front teeth. She needed braces, David had thought. But wearing braces wouldn’t hold her back. Lauren could pull off playing Amanda Wingfield with a retainer. It would just seem part of the play, like Laura’s clubfoot.

Switching off the hilarity with a wave of his hand, Samuels said to Kathy, “Okay, now I want you to remember one of the unhappiest moments of your life. I want you to show us pain as openly as you just did with pleasure.”

As if to forestall a hiccup, Kathy gulped and collected herself. Then she looked to her left, giving her audience the impression that her unhappy memories were all grouped together over there in the corner.

A cold mist seemed to drift over her. Suddenly she choked. And then she burst into tears.

As Kathy stood there sobbing and trembling, the student actors nearly froze in their seats.

Behind his eyes, David felt a damp heat that he was afraid might embarrass him.

Realizing that he was losing control of the situation, Samuels, his hands raised, fluttered awkwardly around Kathy in an attempt to calm her down.

“O-okay, okay,” he stammered. “You started it. You can turn it off.”

Kathy’s shoulders heaved. She clenched her fists. Her sobbing subsided.

“Now
that’s
how you convince your audience,” Samuels said by way of apology.

The remaining hour of the workshop was uninspiring and tepid, though. Like the others, David kept thinking about Kathy.

Once she had said to him, “We’re very informal in my family. When I was home for spring break, my father and I were in the bathroom at the same time, and we were both naked. When he bent over to pick up the bath mat I gave him this big wet kiss, right in the middle of his back.”

David and Kathy were both from Jewish families, but David came from a family buttoned up to the chin in guilt and shame, and capable of expressing affection only in portions of food. Had he tried to act out the bathroom scenario with his mother, she would, he imagined, have made a parachute of bed sheets and garter belts and leaped from the window of their seventeenth-story apartment to the safety of Sixth Avenue below.

Yet it was Kathy’s unselfconscious openness that had damaged her as an undergraduate actress. Lacking David’s vanity and ambition, she gave too generously of herself in thankless roles. In December she had played to nearly empty houses as the lead in a turkey by the obscure European playwright Michel de Ghelderode. And the year before she had struggled through a nearly identical ordeal in a vehicle by the Italian poulterer Ugo Betti. Both of these disasters had been Mr. Cherry’s shows. He was the technical director, and he chose plays suitable for the murky lighting effects he liked to create, and to which he would sacrifice anyone’s talent.

David’s memory of Kathy’s recent run in another of Mr. Cherry’s endless twilights, together with the exhibition of sheer misery that she’d put on today, so distracted him from the rest of the workshop that it all might as well have been television—and he liked to describe TV watching as the mind picking its teeth.

Kathy had started him thinking about the odds again. Of making it as an actor once you left school. They would be graduating—he, Kathy, Melanie, Paula, Mike—in less than four months.

What would happen to them if they didn’t make it? And the chances were maybe one in a hundred thousand that
any
of them would make it.

What then? Vietnam? Law school? Running some little theater in Wisconsin, or selling tickets in New York, and living in a room with a bed and a toaster, like the women with dirty hair and seams in their stockings who showed you with their flashlights to your seats?

Often David had to will himself not to think about the alternatives to success, about compromising. Up until now, he’d always been able to turn his thoughts to the role he’d be playing in the next major production. But at this point, there was just one major production left, Riddiford’s
Lear.

While the pathetic Samuels slogged along, David told himself that he’d be best off playing Kent. Like Kent, he was dedicated and determined. And a survivor.

Riddiford himself was going to play Lear.

It was an event for someone on the faculty to act in a show, let alone play the lead in it.

David couldn’t help but wonder what Riddiford’s motivation was. This was partly out of a habit of thinking about motivations for the characters he played himself—and partly because he could see himself in Riddiford’s place: as the director, the one with the power. Power had always fascinated David.

3

When Melanie Chisolm’s father showed up for a parents’ weekend, Paula Rubin took one look at him and said, “When you see some people’s parents, you understand why they’re the way they are.” With his shock of white hair, Melanie’s father looked to be about eighty, but he was not bent, nor was he shrunken. He stood an imperious six feet tall, and he wore a black homburg hat that heightened him even more. His overcoat, which was also black, had a velvet collar. To complete his darkling tintype he carried a gold-headed ebony walking stick. Everything about the man was formal and reserved. He was, in his manner and appearance, a model of an eminent Victorian.