The Confessions of Edward Day (26 page)

Oh, here we go, I thought. “Look,” I said, “I know I’ve been a big disappointment to you but I just can’t keep my mind focused every second of the day on how grateful I am to you.”

The sound of applause, like a thousand ping-pong balls simultaneously dropped into play, pattered in over the intercom. The intermission had begun. Guy lurched to his feet, clutching the backpack to his stomach, and with a crabbed sideways step brought his shoulder to the door and eased it closed. Panic turned a screw in my chest and tightened the cords in my throat. The murmuring of my fellow actors as they drifted to their dressing rooms, a cough, a laugh I recognized as Rory’s, a ribald exchange as he and Anton sat down to their card game, the creak of shoe soles against linoleum, the glug of water running in the pipes, all these familiar sounds of our daily routine were improbably dear to me. Why was I trapped with this crazed loser and his backpack? I could have pushed past him, pulled the door open, and ordered him out, but I didn’t. If I made him leave he would run straight to Madeleine’s dressing room and start in on her. She’d gotten through the first act well enough, tearing up prettily during her brief and marvelous response to Vanya’s teasing.
Everyone looks at me with pity, poor thing, she has an old husband! This sympathy for me, how I understand it
. Her voice quavered on the last line in a way I hadn’t heard before. Our big scene was coming up and I didn’t want her distracted, so I decided to have it out, whatever “it” was, with her husband. He had resumed his seat, hunching over the bag like some beggar going through the day’s collection of rags and bottles. “What is it you want from me, Guy?” I asked.

He glanced up sharply over the bag. “Don’t ask me that,” he snapped. “If you had any interest in what I want, we wouldn’t be here.”

I could think of no response to this assertion, which was, I recognized, indisputable. I twisted the waxed tip of my mustache, gazing upon my unwelcome guest. I knew too much about him, I thought, and though some of what I knew should have made me pity him, what I felt was a steadily mounting irritation, such as a buzzing fly produces of a Sunday morning when one is trying to read the papers. Just as, while rolling up the book review for use as a weapon, one may succumb to a grudging admiration for the doomed insect, I admitted that there was in Guy’s persistence, as well as his supremely confident appropriation of the moral higher ground, something impressive. He seemed incapable of seeing himself as anything but wronged. So be it, I thought. “You’re right,” I said. “I don’t care what you want.”

He returned his attention to the bag. “That’s better. At least you’re being honest.”

“Has it ever occurred to you to ask yourself what
I
want?”

“I know what you want.”

“Do you?” I said. “And what is that?”

I assumed he would say
my wife
, and I was prepared with my response, which was that his wife could make her own decisions. But instead he lifted his head and considered me thoughtfully, his eyes fixed vacantly on my forehead as if he were reading a scroll on a video screen. “You want to be rid of me.”

A hoot of laughter followed by a shout of “In your
dreams!” echoed from the card game outside. Then came the rapping knuckles and the repeated warning, “Five minutes, five minutes,” from the stage manager making his rounds. I turned to the dressing shelf and opened a stick of liner. “I don’t have time for this,” I said.

Guy made a sound somewhere between a gargle and a laugh. I could see him in the mirror, pressing his palm into his forehead, smoothing back the hair from his temples. “I think you do,” he replied.

“Has she told you that she’s leaving you?” I said. “Is that what this is all about?”

“She’s not leaving me. What makes you say that?”

“Jesus, Guy,” I said. “Why should she stay with you? You keep her like a jailer. She’s young, beautiful, talented, she’s a successful actress. Once she’s free of you, the world’s at her feet. Do you think she doesn’t know that?”

“Did she tell you that?”

“She doesn’t have to tell me. Take a look in the mirror.” I stepped aside and his eyes shifted to the mirror in which we were both reflected, but he didn’t look at himself. He glared at my reflection. For an eerie moment our eyes met on the surface of the glass.

“Three minutes,” the call came from the hall. “Three minutes.”

Doors snapped and creaked and the atmosphere between us thickened as the bustle of actors heated up in the hall. Madeleine was out there. When the lights came up in three minutes, she would be onstage, complaining to Vanya about how bored she was. I tried to distinguish her voice, her tread,
but it was impossible. Guy wasn’t listening. He was back at the bag, which had evidently an endless potential for engaging his interest. He reminded me of Beckett’s character Winnie, in
Happy Days
, buried to her waist in sand, reaching for her purse whenever her ruminations veer too close to the abyss. “There is, of course, the bag,” she says.

“Look,” I said to Guy, “you can wait in here until I get back.”

“But you’re not going anywhere,” he said. He had extracted something new from the bag, something I couldn’t make out at first because his head was down and he was turning it over in his hands, fiddling with it. Then he parted his legs, the bag slipped to the floor with a thud, and I saw that he was holding an extremely nasty-looking revolver and pointing it directly at me.

The apprehension of a tight spot always commences with a flush of incredulity. There’s a mistake here. This isn’t really happening. So it was, without any sense of the ironic potential which strikes me now as charmingly piquant, that I asked, “Is it real?”

“Oh yes,” Guy said, narrowing his eyes at me in a way that struck me as absurd. Was he taking aim? Why bother, the pistol was huge and we weren’t five feet apart. “It’s real, it’s loaded, and I’ve just removed the safety.”

I wasn’t afraid, though I should have been. The gun affected me as a provocation rather than a threat. I felt elated, light on my feet, and ready to match wits. “I hope you’ve considered the consequences of your actions,” I cautioned.

He rearranged his mouth into a sneer and tilted his head as
if listening to an inner dictate. A sour, metallic smell wafted off of him and I noted a line of perspiration gathering over his brow. “I have, actually,” he said.

“Because even though I know you’re unhappy and disgruntled, and rightly so, I don’t deny that you have a legitimate complaint, I don’t see how what you’re doing can help matters. Not for Madeleine, and not for you, and certainly not for me.”

“You will be the biggest loser,” he agreed.

The intercom crackled overhead. Act 3 had begun.
The Herr Professor has graciously expressed the desire that we should all assemble in this room at one o’clock today
, Vanya said.

“That may be,” I said, “but you’ll lose Madeleine either way.”

He blinked, pushing the pistol out over his knees. Madeleine’s voice, falsely amplified, said,
It’s probably business
.

“This isn’t about Madeleine,” Guy said. “It never was.”

I pressed on. “You tell yourself you care for her, but think about the impossibility of her situation. She can’t have children; she’s stuck in a sexless marriage. It’s unbearable.”

Wrong card. We both watched his index finger stretch over the trigger. “What are you talking about?” he said.

“What do you think I’m talking about?”

I’m dying of boredom
, Elena lamented above our heads.
I don’t know what to do
. With a flourish of my hand I indicated the intercom speaker.

Guy followed my gesture, his eyebrows knit, his upper lip lifted over his teeth, completely mystified. “That’s good,” I said. “You’re good in this part.”

He returned his puzzled attention to me. “She’s not stuck in a sexless marriage,” he said. “That’s ridiculous. We have sex all the time.”

You must be a witch
, Sonya chided Elena.

I nodded sympathetically. “It’s nothing to be ashamed of,” I said. “It can happen to any man.”

He laughed. “This is rich,” he said. “There’s nothing she won’t say when she wants to get laid. And she’s insatiable, but you know that. We had great makeup sex that night after I found you in the hotel room, she was really hot. We called you the warm-up act.”

“Guy,” I said, “give it up.”

Now Sonya confessed her love for Astrov to Elena.
I love him more than my own mother. Every minute I seem to hear him, feel the pressure of his hand
.

It was my cue to head for the stage. I moved closer to the door, oblivious to the armed threat in the chair. The theater chestnut called “Chekhov’s rule” popped into my brain: a pistol on the wall in the first act must go off in the third. Guy was still chuckling over the joke he and Madeleine had enjoyed at my expense. “No, really,” he said. “She told you we didn’t have sex and you believed her?” So great was his amusement that his hand relaxed and the barrel of the gun tilted toward the floor.

I took the chance to push past him, throwing open the door. His head came up and he jerked around in the chair, leveling the gun at me. Who knows what came over me, a near fatal curiosity, an irresistible impulse to risk my life, but I paused at the door and looked back at him. He was hunched
forward awkwardly over the gun, as if it was alive and he had to struggle to keep it from pulling him out of the chair. His chin was down, and his eyes, rolled up and fixed on me, brimmed with hatred such as I have never seen before or since. It shocked me, that look, it frightened me, and I dodged away. He’s going to hurt someone, I thought as I rounded the corner and darted up the steps to the wings where a stagehand waited to hand me the roll of maps I would display to the indifferent Elena. “Listen closely,” I said to him. “There’s a man with a gun in my dressing room. Don’t go down there. Tell Peter to call the police.” His eyes grew wide and solemn and he nodded his head, glancing anxiously past me at the stairs. “Just don’t go down there,” I said. He nodded, wandering away into the wings.

Sonya came offstage and stood quietly to one side. We both watched Elena, who was alone before the audience, debating with herself the pros and cons of yielding to Astrov’s charms.
But I’m a coward. My conscience would torment me. He comes here every day, I can guess why, and even now I feel guilty
.

Gripping my charts, I moved to the dark at the edge of the stage. Elena paced during her monologue, not in agitation, but aimlessly, tormented by her thoughts, too lazy to act, to put herself out of her own misery.
I am ready to fall on my knees before Sonya, and ask her to forgive me, to weep
.

I stepped into the lights, advancing strongly upon this beautiful intruder who was destroying my orderly life.
Good Day!
I said, and we shook hands.

In this scene Astrov has come to show Elena his passion, the geographical charts he has made which detail the gradual
degradation of the flora and fauna in the neighborhood. Elena has expressed an interest in seeing them, but this is a ruse; what she wants is to tell him that Sonya is in love with him and, thereby, to draw him out on the subject of his heart, which she believes herself to have captured. I spread out my charts across the table before Elena, fixing them with clips, and began my lecture on ecology.
Now look at this. This is a map of our district as it was fifty years ago. The dark and light green represent forests
.

I loved this speech. Even the most indifferent members of the audience were stirred by the prophetic vision of our nineteenth-century playwright. It’s a mighty plea for environmental stewardship but it’s also an argument for the vital necessity of art.
On this lake there were swans, geese, ducks, and, as the old people say, a powerful lot of birds of all sorts, no end of them; they flew in clouds
. I raised my hand, indicating an imaginary flock darkening the sky and inviting Elena with an eager, schoolboy earnestness to humor me, to stretch her limited imagination to a sense of natural wonder. Of course, she couldn’t do it. She gave me a look of frustrated sadness. She was bound by law and by social stricture to a sick, tyrannical old man who kept her awake all night moaning about his gout. Why should she care if there had once been geese honking across the horizon, wild goats and elk startling the weary traveler in the woods at night?

I returned to my chart. I was dead center at the heart of Doctor Mikhail Astrov, a moody, lonely, cynical man, yet passionate about life and driven to do something worth doing in this world, longing at this moment to share his despair of the present and dim hope for the future with a beautiful, desirable, sexually frustrated woman who is bored by what interests him.
Edward Day was gone; Guy Margate a nonentity, a disturbing dream from which Astrov has awakened.
Besides villages and hamlets
, I continued,
you can see scattered here and there, various settlements, small farms, hermitages of the Old Believers
. I lowered my chin and raised my eyes, letting her in on my skepticism about the “Old Believers.”

She isn’t listening, I thought. Her mind is wandering. But I won’t stop yet. I want her to understand how much is at stake in this world, because men are indifferent to beauty.
This is how it was twenty-five years ago
. I rolled up the top sheet exposing a second chart.
Already one-third of the area is woodland. There are no longer any goats
. I went on, but she resisted me. I made the case that it wasn’t a matter of progress, the old giving way to the new, but rather of
a degeneration due to stagnation, ignorance, complete lack of understanding
. When I lifted my finger from my meticulously drawn map, I saw that her eyes were glazed with boredom. I drew away, closing my heart to her.
But I can see by your face that this doesn’t interest you
.

I understand so little of all this
, she said.

In frustration I rolled up my charts.
There’s nothing to understand; it’s simply uninteresting
.

She gave me her coy smile; really, she was enough to try a saint.
To be quite frank, my thoughts were elsewhere
.