The Confessions of Edward Day (2 page)

I wonder now what I said. I remember a torrent of incredulity; for several moments I simply didn’t believe my ears. I looked around at the suddenly unfamiliar furniture of my Spartan dorm room and spotted, of course, the scrap of paper with the message that concluded:
Mother again, MIDNIGHT
. The ensuing sob that rose from very deep within me came out as an agonized groan of pain. “Son, do you want me to drive down to get you?” my father said.

“Oh Dad,” I wailed. “Oh Dad …” But I didn’t say,
She called me
, and I never did tell him, or anyone else for that matter. My roommate knew but we were hardly more than acquaintances and he, out of courtesy perhaps, never said anything about the messages. When I got home my brothers were all
there and it was clear that she had not tried to call any of them, or my father, either. Just me, the baby, Leslie, who made her laugh with my horror of blood. She’d left a note, addressed to no one, two words:
I’m sorry
.

After the funeral, I returned to school. You can imagine my confusion. I was nineteen, an innocent, and my emotions were in an uproar. I wasn’t so naïve as to equate sex with death, though my experience certainly suggested the connection forcefully: have sex, your mother kills herself. Rationally I knew I had nothing to do with Mother’s despair, though I couldn’t resist speculating about how differently things might have gone if I’d been what Mother wanted: a girl. Would a daughter have walked into the cramped apartment, taken one look at Helen, and said, “No, Mom, you’re not doing this”? Worst of all was the second-guessing about the missed calls; if I had been studying in my room like a diligent student, could I have saved her? This question kept me awake at night. For months I woke to a refrain that sent me out of the dorm and into the late-night diners near the campus
—She needed me, I wasn’t there
.

Of course word had gotten around that I was a motherless boy, and sympathetic female arms stretched out to me from every direction. I said Mother had died suddenly in her sleep, which satisfied everyone and wasn’t entirely a lie. Brünnhilde was suitably tentative when next we met. Though I said nothing about the manner of Mother’s death Brünnhilde understood that the proximity of the event to our first coupling might be disturbing to me. I declined the halfhearted invitation to the Friday gatherings and in a few weeks she had a new
lapdog, a budding playwright who wrote monologues about his miserable childhood in Trenton, New Jersey.

Gradually the shock wore off and I began to take an interest in my feelings as opposed to simply feeling them nonstop. My acting classes were particularly useful for this. As Stanislavski observed, “In the language of an actor
to know
is synonymous with
to feel
.” My studies offered access to the very knowledge I most required. Many actors are called to their profession by an insatiable craving to be seen, to be admired, and to be famous, but for me acting was an egress from unbearable sorrow and guilt. My emotions at that point were the strongest thing about me; they did battle with one another and I looked on, a helpless bystander. This, I realized, mirrored the position of the audience before the stage. I wanted to find a visceral way to give an audience everything they needed to know about suffering, which is, after all, the subject of most drama, including comedies, hence the expression “I laughed until I cried.” I studied my peers and attempted to assess my position among them. Many were drawn to the theater because they possessed such physical beauty that they stood out in a crowd, they looked like actors, but what, I wondered, possessed the overweight girls, the hopelessly nerdy guys who would be doomed by their physiognomy to a lifetime of character parts? One in particular fascinated me, a short, scrawny, colorless boy named Neil Nielson, who cultivated a scanty reddish mustache beneath his pudgy inelegant nose and gazed upon the world through wire-rimmed lenses that magnified his lashless, watery eyes to twice their size. Physically there was nothing appealing about him, but he had a voice that was the envy of us all, as
rich and melodious as a cello. When he laughed, a smile flickered on every face within earshot. Naturally, he was called “the voice.” A future in radio beckoned him, which was too bad because he was a gifted actor. If you saw him sitting at a bar you wouldn’t look twice, but on a stage he had a weirdly erotic force—he would have made a great Richard III. He was interested in me because girls were, and he hoped to pick up on that action. I liked his company because he had serious things to say about acting. His approach was remarkably selfless; he found his character outside himself. We once did a Pinter scene in a workshop; I think it was from
Betrayal
. We exchanged roles after a break and did it again. I was astounded by what his interpretation did to my own, it was as if I was being subjected to a minute and continuous analysis by someone who could see right into the heart of me, my motivations and anxieties laid more bare with each exchange. Later I asked him how he did what he did and he said something I’ve never forgotten: “I get myself from what I see you getting about me.” It sounds like nonsense, but I think I understood it. Neil was doomed to bring out the best in lesser actors and to his credit, he didn’t seem to mind. He played Rosencrantz in the production of
Hamlet
that was the triumph of my senior year. We did eight performances and our brief scene together was different every night. If there was a scintilla of suspicion in my greeting
—How dost thou Guildenstern! Ah Rosencrantz!—
he picked it up and proceeded with utmost caution, but if my manner expressed pleasure and relief to discover true friends in the prison that was Denmark, his overconfidence was his death warrant. He made keen play of his small bit, and as our Polonius was a life-less
drone, my heart lifted when I saw Neil’s pointed little beard and glinting glasses enter the pool of light that it was my sovereign right to occupy in the universe of that play.

There was nothing especially intelligent or innovative about my own performance, though everyone, including the local press, praised it as if they’d never seen my equal. My teachers gushed with enthusiasm; my director, a voluptuous graduate student, fell in love with me, and we had a brief affair. I knew I was feeling my way, that my insecurity was part of what made my prince Hamlet so appealing. I was, as he was, a youth, a student, and I had lost a parent in suspicious circumstances. It was during those rehearsals that I first allowed myself the thought that my mother’s death was a crime against me, me personally. I could see Helen’s angry sneer as she slapped the pages of her magazine against the table while Mother encouraged me to study medicine, and her bitter denouncement of the amity between us rang in my ears. “I hate this part of you.” One night I woke from panicked dreams with the idea that I must find Helen and make her pay for what she had done to me. Then, sweating and cursing in my narrow dorm bed, I remembered that she had denied me that option. My lines came to me and I whispered them into the darkness:
That I, the son of a dear father murder’d, Prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell, Must, like a whore, unpack my heart with words, And fall a-cursing, like a very drab
. I wept, not for Hamlet, who lived just long enough to avenge his father’s murder, but for myself.

I’
ll jump ahead
to a sultry morning in July 1974. College was behind me. I was in my tiny Greenwich Village apartment packing my battered suitcase, the same suitcase I took to North Carolina when I was nineteen, the same one I carried when I arrived at Penn Station four years after that, ambitious, confident, and ignorant as a post. I experienced a pang of anxiety as I held up my swimming trunks, worn and venerable as my suitcase and woefully out of style, but there was nothing to be done about them—my ride was arriving within the hour—so I tossed them in with the rest, the T-shirts, the cutoff jeans, my Dopp kit, the gray linen jacket with the Italian label that I’d gotten secondhand, the madras shirt, the oversize belt, the black dress jeans. I snapped the top down and went into the bathroom, where I stood before the mirror, combing my hair.

Stanislavski described such a moment, a man combing his hair before a mirror, as one of perfect naturalness and ease, and therefore poetic; for him it epitomized “truth,” which was the condition an actor must discover in performance. He called it “public solitude,” the notion being, I supposed, that we are
most “ourselves” when we don’t have an audience. I smiled at my face in the mirror, recognizing that smile, the one I trusted as no other, which seems odd to me now because at the time I knew nothing about that smiling young man combing his hair; he was as opaque as a clay jug. Soon I would be on the Jersey shore in my outmoded trunks and madras shirt, and with any luck I’d have my arm around the waist of Madeleine Delavergne. Would that waist be bare? Would Madeleine sport a one-piece suit, or a bikini? Was such a thing as a bikini possible on the Jersey shore?

There would be eight of us, all acting students, though we didn’t attend the same schools. Madeleine and I were students in Sanford Meisner’s professional program at his studio on Fifty-sixth Street, but Teddy Winterbottom, he of the Yale degree and the large Victorian beach house, studied with the great Stella Adler. I had become acquainted with Teddy over a lot of beer at the Cedar Tavern, and though I’d never seen him act, he was a wonderful raconteur and general purveyor of bonhomie. His family was traveling abroad, and we would have the house to ourselves for the holiday weekend. There were, Teddy promised, eight beds, one for each dwarf, and one more for him.

I heard the blare of Teddy’s horn from the street and crossed my narrow living room to wave out the open window. He drove an MG convertible; the top was down, so he saw me and waved back. My long legs weren’t designed for a sports car; it would be a tedious, hot, uncomfortable drive, but I couldn’t have cared less. I snatched my suitcase from the table and, pausing only to turn the dead bolt, rushed down the four dusty
flights of stairs into the street. My poetic moment before the mirror left my mind entirely.

As it turned out, the house wasn’t on the beach, but it was scarcely a block away. Like its neighbors, it was large, airy, swaddled with deep porches, shingled over, and trimmed with decorative flourishes. Red was the predominating color, the shingles a sun-faded rose, the wide-board floors gleaming cadmium, with touches of red in the furnishings, a pillow here, a slipcover there. Teddy and I spent an hour or so opening windows, plugging in appliances, distributing linens to the various bedrooms and cushions to the wicker couches on the porches. By the time he announced his intention to leave me in charge while he ran out to the grocery for provisions, I was acquainted with the house from cellar to attic. “Put Becky and James in the room with the double bed,” he said. “And tell the rest it’s first come, first served.”

He wasn’t gone long when Madeleine and her friend Mindy Banks pulled up at the curb in a rusty Dodge crammed with groceries, suitcases, and a miserable dachshund named Lawrence, who hit the ground with a grunt, trotted to a poor stripling of a tree near the curb, and peed mightily. “I’m with Lawrence,” Madeleine exclaimed, bounding past me up the stairs. “Where’s the john?”

We had met before, casually, in class and at Jimmy Ray’s bar, always in a crowd. Aspiring actresses are often damaged, neurotic girls but Madeleine struck me as unusually stable and confident. She had masses of wavy black hair, pale skin, hazel eyes, full pouting lips, and enviable cheekbones. Her only physical flaw was her hips, which were a little wide.

“There’s one just off the upstairs landing,” I called after her. “On your left.”

“Thanks,” she said, not looking back. Lawrence left off the tree and fell to sniffing my pants leg. Mindy came up carrying a grocery bag, which she handed to me. “You’re Ed, aren’t you?” she said. “We met one time at Teddy’s.”

By dinner everyone had arrived except Peter Davis, who was bringing a friend no one knew. “Some guy who lives in a rathole in Chelsea,” Teddy said. “He’s only been in town a few months. He works in the bookstore with Peter, doesn’t seem to have any friends or family. Peter said he felt sorry for him, so I said bring him along.”

I didn’t like the sound of this, especially as we had far too many males in our group already. I was making good headway in my campaign for Madeleine’s attention, and I didn’t want her distracted. In the afternoon, I’d persuaded her to walk with me on the beach, and I’d served as her sous-chef at dinner. The food was awful, vegetarian fare—this was before the soybean had been tamed, and good bread was only to be had in dreary co-op food stores. Salad was romaine lettuce at best, mesclun was as rare as diamonds, arugula as yet unheard of on our planet. But we had cases of beer and cheap wine, various small stashes of marijuana, and a freezer full of ice cream, so we were enjoying ourselves. As the sun went down, the breeze off the ocean cooled from torrid to sultry and we moved from the dining room to the wide screened-in porch. The talk was all of theater, who was doing what plays where, who had the best deal on head shots, the relative merits of acting teachers and schools, the catch-22 of Actors’ Equity, the anxieties, perils,
and hilarious adventures of those who had appeared nude onstage. Madeleine had chosen a wicker chair near mine. On our walk she had told me of her recent breakup with a boyfriend of some duration; they had lived together in an apartment on West Forty-seventh for more than a year. She made light of the matter; the boyfriend was a slob who ate bacon-and-peanut-butter sandwiches and didn’t wash the pan, left his clothes on the floor, always managed to leave a smear of toothpaste on the sink drain. The end came when she returned from a weekend visit to her parents in Cleveland to find he’d let the bathtub overflow and the downstairs neighbors had called the landlord because the water was pouring down their kitchen wall. “He was working on his play and he forgot he’d turned on the tap,” she said.

“He’s a playwright.”