Stages (39 page)

“The Twilight Zone?”

“Let’s not try to be funny, huh, please? It’s not right, not when we’re talking this kind of dough. I have a wife, and kids. And Victor has Miguel.”

“I know. Who makes the ice cream for the kid’s birthday parties?”

“Put ice cream in their mouths and take away their college education.”

“Don’t try to make me feel guilty, Bruce.” Veronica threw the heavy spoon into the sink and pushed the cap down on the ice cream container with all her might. “I don’t
have
any kids, remember?” she said, her voice almost cracking—and her own, not Gina’s. “I’ve given up a lot to be what I am. I’ve given up any chance I might have had to be happy leading a normal, ordinary life. This is all I’ve got, Bruce. And I won’t compromise it, I
won’t.
Do you think I care about the money? My work is giving away—everything of myself. And it’s kept. They don’t give it back, you know. But they look at it again and again, and at least I can say that when they look at me they don’t see anything bad.”

“So what? So what if this thing bombs, for two million dollars? The public will forgive you.”

“But I won’t be able to forgive myself. You know what my personal life is, Bruce. In the past two years I’ve had three brief little affairs, one with a screenwriter on the make in every possible way, one with a shy, horribly insecure, defensive stand-up comedian, and one with my manager.”

Bruce looked at the door.

“I thought we were never going to talk about it,” he said.

“You force me to. Look at me, look at what I am. I’m nothing. I have no one. But I work every day, I kill myself, in order to become someone else, to be a real human being up there on that screen, to be larger than my miserable little life. That’s
something,
Bruce. To me, it really matters. And I’m not going to let you or Victor or David Whitman or anyone else take it away from me, not for two million dollars or twenty million dollars. I could never be paid enough, Bruce, because I’m the one who has paid.” Bruce sat there in silence on the sofa.

Veronica stood by the sink, her hand on the counter and her chest heaving.

There was a rap on the door.

“Ready, Miss Simmons,” a voice said.

“Okay, be there in a sec,” said Veronica, in Gina’s voice.

Bruce picked up the script that was lying on the coffee table. He straightened the pages and wrapped an elastic around it.

“All right,” he said weakly. “You win.”

He stepped down from the Winnebago. Across the street, the bakery was lit so brightly it bothered Bruce’s eyes, like the sun reflecting off snow. He looked the other way. Across the street he saw a crowd already gathering to watch. They were probably wondering, he thought, why the store had to have spotlights on it with the sun already up. He stepped carefully over the cables again, in the inadequate light of day.

62

There were moments in Lauren’s life when she felt happy, and moments when she was sad. Although she was protected and insulated by money, her joys and sorrows were basically the same as anyone else’s—seeing her son Nathaniel take his first steps, sitting at her father’s funeral while her oldest brother broke down trying to tell the world the kind of man their dad was, going with Jason at Christmas to one of the drying-out places where his mother would sit watching her hand shake as she tried to stir her coffee. There was a part of her emotional life that she thought was not quite like other people’s though, and that was her life in the theater.

She did not really share what she experienced there with Jason or anyone else. After the
Hotel Baltimore,
Lauren and Jason had begun to go to shows regularly. There were times at those shows—it happened regularly, although not always with the same intensity—when Lauren would feel as though she had given her heart over to the play and its players. She would feel the pressure of tears on her eyes. She would feel pride and a terrible longing to be part of what she could only watch. And at the end she would applaud with something beyond enthusiasm, something that was close to a need for release.

The feeling was almost unbearable the night she saw Colleen Dewhurst and Jason Robards in the revival of
Moon for the Misbegotten.
Later, reading a review of the show in
Time
magazine, Lauren paused at “The audience knew it was in the presence of theatrical royalty.” True, she thought. But she knew it was something more than humility that she had felt. She had been lifted out of herself into a realm of understanding that had transcended everything: the pretheater dinner they’d had at the Four Seasons, her pocketbook by her side, Nathaniel’s head cold, the Playbill that had flopped onto the floor. Afterward, she had walked out onto the street not only humbled but changed. Your own life awaited you, and as you went about it, you would forget the lines perhaps, but never the impression they’d made on you. It was as if you had been in touch with the universe, not of the stars but of the souls of other people, and that was to experience the enormity of life on earth itself.

Lauren knew that Jason would never have understood if she’d told him that it was the theater that had made her so sympathetic toward the hopeless alcoholic his mother had become.

Lauren could tick them off on her fingers like the birthdays of her relatives, the
shows,
all those wonderful, unforgettable moments that she’d spent as part of an audience and which yet she had had entirely to herself.
A Chorus Line. My Fat Friend. Mornings at Seven. American Buffalo. Gemini. Equus. Same Time, Next Year.

And the time she’d waited in line outside the theater where
Appearing Nightly
was going to open, and Lily Tomlin had shown up, just as she’d said she would, dressed as a nurse and pushing a cart with donuts and Kleenex on it for these people foolish enough to be standing there in the cold.

It was a matinee performance of
The Wiz,
as it happened, though, that had what was ultimately to be the most telling effect on Lauren. She had taken Nathaniel, who was still too young for school, wanting to introduce him to the theater early in his life and knowing that he would love
The Wiz
for its costumes and antic spectacle. To his mother’s delight, Nathaniel sat through the entire first act without a single question and with hardly a stir, his face glowing. At the end of the first act, as Lauren was leading him into the aisle, she saw someone she had never dreamed she would see again. James. Looking right at her.

He looked away as soon as he realized she’d spotted him.

God, how he’d aged. He was all gray now, and his face was full of lines. He was with a bunch of kids, obviously his students. That would figure. It was January, and this was probably some theater field trip that they were all taking during intersession.

After Lauren had gotten Nathaniel to the bathroom and back, she couldn’t help looking for him—and there he was, sitting five rows down, on the left. How could it ever have happened with him, she wondered. Why did it ever happen? She hadn’t been looking for a father figure, she knew that now. Was it the theater itself she’d wanted to embrace? Had he been the closest thing she could find? And all he was was a teacher. Kind of a dull one, at that, as far removed from Broadway as a plumber.

James couldn’t even act casual on his way out after the show had ended. Lauren watched him hurrying up the aisle, with his head down.

It took awhile for Lauren’s chauffeur to get through the traffic. It was even worse on Seventh Avenue; there’d been an accident between a bus and a van. The van was sort of stuck to the bus by a chrome strip along its side, and the drivers were trying to back off each other. A kid in the slushy street was attempting to direct them.

Lauren recognized the kid. He was one of James’ smartass students. And it was James driving the van. As her long, curtained Cadillac slipped past, Lauren saw him wrestling with the wheel. He looked helpless, and hopelessly frustrated. He looked as though he were dangling in midair. Lauren did not look back.

That night she said to Jason, “You know, I was just thinking, we gave what, over a hundred thousand dollars to Blake last year, didn’t we?”

“The dean send you another notice of a regional meeting?” Jason asked.

“I always make them earmark half of it for the drama department. I wonder sometimes—they are in the will, after all—I wonder sometimes if there isn’t something else we could do, more immediate, more vital to the life of the theater.”

“You and your theater. What do you have in mind?”

“Have you ever thought of becoming a Broadway angel?”

“You mean investing in shows?” Jason contemplated the wineglass in his hand. “I’ve heard that that’s a great way to lose money.”

“Does that matter?”

“No. You know the business is more than okay.”

“I think I want to do it then.”

“Fine. It’ll be your thing, though. I haven’t got the time.”

“I know. I know. I want it to be my thing. I want to be involved.”

“What do you think, Nat?” his father asked. “You want to bankroll some cartoons?”

“Sure,” said Nathaniel.

He was grinning just like the kid who had been trying to direct James in the street. And, his mother thought wistfully, he knew just about as much.

63

“Miss Chisolm?”

“Yes,” said Melanie.

“Miss Chisolm, I’m Sergeant Nicholson, of the Boston Police Department. I’m afraid I have bad news. Your father collapsed and died late this morning, on Newbury Street. They had him at the hospital within ten minutes, but I’m sorry to have to tell you that it was too late.”

Melanie was stunned. She had to reach around inside herself for words.

“Thank you for calling me,” she said after a moment. “This…is a shock. I have to think…I’ll…I’ll fly right up there, as soon as I can get on a plane. I’ll call my father’s lawyer. He’ll know…about the funeral home, whatever my father wanted done when this happened.”

The sergeant gave Melanie the name and number of the person to be contacted at the hospital where her father’s body was, told her he was very sorry for her loss, and hung up.

Still numbed, but pushed by a sense of duty, Melanie looked up the name of her father’s lawyer in her address book and then called him. He spoke reassuringly, told her he would do what had to be done, and said that he would see her the next day.

Even the obituary was all ready.

Quickly getting together a few clothes, Melanie took a cab to the airport and caught the two o’clock shuttle to Boston. She was in Marion a little before five. Her father was in an anteroom of the local funeral home.

Melanie met with Malcolm Woodworth, the funeral director, that evening. She had known him in high school. He’d taken over the business from his father, after skating for three years with the Ice Capades. Malcolm hadn’t changed much. He’d filled out to a kind of teddy bear stockiness, but he still had the same bright blue eyes and the same air of patient resignation. He made Melanie think of an old photograph she’d once seen of John D. Rockefeller ice skating on his private rink, with a top hat on and his hands folded behind his back.

“I’m sorry we had to see each other again under these circumstances,” Malcolm began.

“It had to happen eventually,” Melanie said. “He
was
an old man. He always used to say, ‘We have to be realistic about death.’ And I am. It justifies my being so unrealistic about everything else.”

Malcolm offered Melanie a chair. She sat down, and he began to ask her questions about the visiting hours, and whether or not the services should be held in the church or at the chapel here.

“Do it here,” Melanie replied. “I don’t think many people are going to come. There aren’t that many left. So many of his friends are gone, and I only have a few relatives—second cousins. I don’t think I’d know some of them if I ran into them in the street.”

With the time of the visiting hours and the place of the services set, Malcolm asked Melanie if she could decide on a coffin. He showed her into a room full of them. They were set up on skirted stands, with their lids open. Some of the caskets were metal. Most of them were wood, and French polished. Melanie chose one that reminded her of paneling in her father’s office.

“He wouldn’t have wanted the ruffled pillow,” she said.

“We’ll need a suit of his,” said Malcolm, “and a shirt and tie.”

“Of course,” Melanie said. “I’ll bring them over first thing in the morning. Funny thing, to go into Brooks Brothers and buy a suit not knowing it’s going to be for all eternity….
”

She left the funeral home thinking that she was almost getting used to this sort of thing. For the dead, you did as much as you could, which was nothing, plus a few formalities. Maybe this was all part of getting older, this procession of burials. If it kept up this way, you’d finally be so used to it, and so tired of it, that when your own time came, you just wouldn’t care that much. It would be, as her Aunt Edith used to say, a blessing.

When Melanie returned to the funeral home in the morning with her father’s clothes, Malcolm asked her if she would like to have a little “appropriate music” playing in the background during the visiting hours.