The Hamlet Trap (2 page)

William was there, and Eric, Kirby, Anna, Brenda, Bobby… most of the actors who had been put through an extra rehearsal for
Dracula
. Everyone wanted to meet the new director. Ro saw her and called, “That's Ginnie. Meet Gray and Laura.”

She could not see Laura for the people between them, but Gray was tall enough to spot.

“Hi!” she yelled, and he nodded. Grim, she thought. Probably dead tired from the long drive, and now a mob scene, just what he needed. She ducked to get a glimpse of Laura and grinned at her. Even tireder than he was, apparently.

“Ginnie's located a house you might want to rent,” Ro was saying, his voice carrying over the other voices in the office. “Whenever you want to see it, she'll take you.”

“Maybe we should do it now,” Laura said. “I'd like a nap before dinner. It's been a long day.”

He didn't like that, Ginnie thought, watching Gray's expression tighten. And she doesn't like theater people. Like Peter.

“That makes good sense,” Ro said heartily. “Ginnie can drop you off at your motel after you see the house. And I'll pick you up at six-thirty for dinner. Okay?”

They made their way through their welcome committee, and she led them out the back to her car. When she opened the door, they both got in the backseat without speaking. She walked around to the driver's side and got in, and realized that they thought she was a gofer, Ro's secretary, or a stagehand or something. She thought cheerfully, well, fuck you, too, Wonder Boy.

TWO

They had met at a
party given by one of Laura's friends. He had looked over the group and withdrawn to a chair near the front window. There were fifteen or sixteen people in the room, all familiar to Laura, some of them friends, most merely acquaintances. Eventually she had found herself in the chair opposite his and they had nodded at each other silently. The music was too loud and the room reeked of pot and spilled wine.

“Having a good time?” he asked with an edge to his voice.

She shrugged. “Typical
Harvey
party.”

“Where can you get something to eat at this time of night?” he asked abruptly. “Something not pink, not to go on crackers, not cheese.”

She ended up going with him to an all-night restaurant, and she learned about him during the next few hours as they talked and drank coffee. He had had to make the choice, he said, take this part-time job, or hang on in New York hoping for a chance to break in.

And in New York, he had added, only he had known he was not just another green pea in a field of peas. He could live on what he made, he had said, and she understood this to mean that perhaps he would be able to pay rent and eat, but perhaps not. There was no screaming demand for new theatrical directors, he said.

“Or anyone else,” she said. She had been lucky to get her job with Marianne's new advertising agency and she had it only because she and Marianne had been friends for a long time.

When they parted early in the morning, she knew that something had started. That was in October. Just before Thanksgiving she saw his first play. It was not very good, but the reviews blamed the actors, not him. He had done more than anyone had expected, one reviewer had written, considering what he had to work with.

He was angry and defiant and determined. And he was badly hurt. He made his cast work overtime in rehearsal for the next performance, and by the time the run ended he was exhausted. By Christmas they were living together in her apartment.

She knew from the beginning that he was trying desperately to get a job with any theater, anywhere. He sent résumés, reviews, pictures, wrote long letters, followed up every lead. At times he was jubilant with the possibility of this or that working out; then, when it didn't, he was so low in depression that she was afraid for him.

In March, a very lovely sophomore was in his next production,
Pygmalion
. Watching the rehearsals, Laura wondered how he could not fall in love with the women he worked with. When she mentioned it later, his expression was blank. Then he said, “You look at a marble sculpture and see only the beauty of the finished work, right? How do you think the artist feels about the marble? It's nothing but raw material. That's what the actors are, raw material, and the finished play is the work of art, the raw material forgotten, not important.”

She prayed that he truly believed that. She made an effort to still the quiver of jealousy that had presented itself to her as fear.

When he moved in, Marianne had asked, “Whose idea is it?”

She had not been able to answer honestly. She really did not know. When Marianne asked, “Do you love him?” her answer had been immediate and sure. Yes, she loved him and would do whatever it took to keep him.

In September his break came. As soon as she opened the door to their apartment, she knew something good had happened finally. Roses were on the table, the air was fragrant, but it was more than that. The heaviness was gone; it was not like walking into a pressure chamber. Gray yelled from the kitchen and charged into the living room, swept her up, whirled her around, kissing her. “I got it! I got the Ashland job! Ro Cavanaugh was in the audience when
Pygmalion
opened! He loved it!”

At dinner she listened to his excited voice and tried not to think what the words actually meant. Something was ending. After less than a year, something was ending. Gray was thirty-one, two years younger than she was. He was handsome in a classical way, lean and hard of body, thick dark hair, deep blue eyes. He could get a job modeling, she had said once, and he had reacted furiously.

“I don't have to be there until November first,” he said, swirling wine in his glass harder and harder. “Six weeks to get everything wrapped up here. We'll drive and use a rented trailer for the stuff we can't sell. It'll take five or six days. A vacation along the way, a little sightseeing.” The wine splashed out of his glass and they both laughed.

She finally said, “What about my job? You're assuming I'll go too?”

He nodded. “I was assuming you'd go.”

His exuberance had vanished; now he was dark and withdrawn, overwary. Sell what stuff? she thought. He had nothing to sell. He meant for her to sell her furnishings, undo the life she had been building for five years.

“I told them we'd be there a few days early, to catch the last performance or two of this season,” he said.

Slowly she nodded. They both knew she would go. Ashland, she thought. Ash land. An image of burned rubble formed in her mind, ashes blowing in the wind, ashes in her mouth, bitter and sharp.

They planned their trip, made changes, planned alternate routes, and they had a garage sale, then another one, and then gave away what they could not sell and would not take. The weeks evaporated too fast, leaving a final frenzy of activity, including a visit to her parents to say good-bye. Her father had said in the beginning that his daughter was welcome in his house anytime, and his daughter and her husband were welcome, but there was one extra bedroom and no unmarried couple could share it. The visit was for one day, uncomfortable for everyone.

Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Kansas… finally the great Rocky Mountain range, and then the high plateau country. They had stopped at the Craters of the Moon in Idaho, had spent a few hours in the plains of Idaho, crossed the Snake River into Oregon, and were on a road virtually without traffic, with high-desert sagebrush and an occasional juniper tree the only visible life. “What a wasteland,” Gray had said, and gone back to his reading.

A few days before they left home, he had received a carton of manuscripts. His first job, he had told her, was to judge a play-writing contest. The winning play would be his first production. Those he found totally hopeless he marked with a red
N
and put aside. Most of the manuscripts were ending up in the reject box. He read while she drove.

Ash land, she kept thinking. They passed more lava fields; the mountains were stark and wind-carved, outcroppings were black volcanic material, foreboding, almost evil.

“Listen,” Gray said. He read from the manuscript; ‘Daughter, you must not go out with that no-good Stanley. You know you will end up pregnant and what will your father say?'”

“That's pretty direct,” Laura said, laughing. “Are they all like that?”

“No, ma'am, this is one of the better ones.” They both laughed.

How easily he picked up whatever accent he heard. He sounded just like the Kansan who had commented on a restaurant with those words. “You could be an actor,” she had told him once.

He had nodded. “But they have no power, no control. It's the director who decides what kind of reality will be created on the stage. A good director makes the actors believe in that reality, and they make the audience accept it. But before anything can happen, the director has to step into another world, live in it, know it's real. A good director and a good writer share that world in a way no one else can understand, or enter. The writer sees his world, hears his people, but all he can produce are marks on paper, signs pointing to symbols. The director does magic, moves those symbols through another dimension and creates life with them. The actors are tools, only tools, like models, made to be used. I won't be used,” he had finished flatly.

Sometimes it frightened her very much when the thought came unbidden that maybe he was not as good a director as he thought. It frightened her even more when she came to realize that in his world some people were tools to be used, and others were the users of those tools, and she knew that she and Gray were in separate categories.

When she glanced at him again, he was reading another play, this time moving his lips, saying the lines under his breath—a good one finally.

That night she heard her first coyote crying in the distance, lonely, wild, unknowable. She felt a spasm of terror. And that night she roused to see a crack of light from around the bathroom door, dozed, awakened again, then came wide awake when she realized he had been in there for hours.

“Gray?” She called a second time. The light went out and he returned to the bedroom.

“Restless,” he said, getting into bed.

In the morning she found the play that had interested him folded in half, pages dog-eared, penciled notes in the margins. She would read it while he drove, she thought, but she put it aside, forgot it.

“You were all over the bed last night,” Gray said at breakfast. “Dreams?”

She shook her head, lying. There had been dreams—nightmares, actually; already the details had blurred, only the feeling of terror persisted. She knew that in her dreams wild dogs had fought over her bones, that she had cried out over and over and no one had come.

And she could not tell him. She could not say to him, “I can't go with you to ash land because I'll die there.”

THREE

What perverse or even
malign spirit overcame Ginnie she could not have said, but she yielded to it without a struggle and adopted a guide-extraordinaire attitude. “Over there is Lithia Park,” she said brightly. “Very pretty. You can walk two miles, maybe three. Great madrone trees, ponderosa pines, beautiful flowers. It leads into the Elizabethan Theater grounds. The Oregon Shakespearean Festival is what brings people here, of course. The Harley simply capitalizes on the overflow. Ninety-three percent attendance each season. Not bad for a town of fifteen thousand. Of course, the university has forty-five hundred students. I don't think they count them in the census. So, twenty thousand. Medford is up the road about twelve miles and that's another forty thousand, and people are scattered all through the valley. It's the Rogue River valley, by the way, wonderful white-water rafting. They've had it on television sports any number of times.”

On and on she prattled. When she glanced at them in the rearview mirror, Gray was staring stonily out his side window, Laura gazing just as intently out the other one.

“This is the steep way up to the house,” she said, shifting down. “There's another way up that isn't bad at all. I'll take you back that way. And here it is. The view's pretty nice during the day, but at night it's spectacular!” Ginnie parked in the driveway, jumped out, and opened the back door before either Gray or Laura had a chance to.

“Why don't I just give you the key and let you roam by yourselves,” she said brightly. “You'll have things to discuss about the house. I'll wait here.”

She watched them enter and then turned her attention to the view. It was spectacular day or night, just as the view was from her own house. The mountain dropped down to the valley floor, where the main part of town was, then there was a relatively flat area four or five miles wide, then foothills that rolled exactly the way Delaware countryside did, and beyond that, more mountains. Behind her the mountain continued upward, heavily forested, deep green summer and winter, with firs, pines, spruces, madrones—conifers and broad-leaf evergreens of a rain forest merging with trees of a drier climate. Everything was here together. It was nearly chanterelle time, she thought; she and Peter were going on a great mushroom hunt after a good soaking rain. Any day now it would rain, the start of the new season, but this day was brilliantly clear, the sky gloriously blue, with idealized clouds, the kind that children draw, glowing marshmallow clouds. There would be another breathtaking sunset later.

Inside the house, Gray watched Laura examine the rooms. Too expensive, they both had said on entering, but he wasn't sure. Maybe the owners were desperate to have it occupied during the winter. He would call. And meanwhile he didn't give a damn about room size, or furnishings, or even the view. It was okay, good enough, if they could afford it.

“You going to tell me what's bugging you?” he asked abruptly.

“Nothing.” She stiffened with the words in a way that meant: Don't push, not right now, anyway.

He understood her signals, maybe even better than she did. He did not push. He knew part of the problem: as he had become more and more excited and eager, she had become more anxious and withdrawn. What he had seen as the opportunity to meet colleagues, she had seen as the threat of an overwhelming mob. Already he was categorizing the people he had met, and she probably didn't remember a single name, except for Roman Cavanaugh. He understood, but felt impatient with her sudden insecurity. This was his world in a way that the University of Connecticut had never been. Here he would be in charge, in control, not a part-time flunky serving at the whim of a jackass who had tenure. Laura had gone into the kitchen to check on cookware: apparently they would have to buy nothing, it was all in the house, except for linens, and they had packed hers in the trailer. Gray gazed out the window at the view across the valley, and wanted only to get on with it, to start his new job.

Laura returned carrying a notebook. They would have to get the electricity turned on, and the phone, find out about garbage collection… . “It's really a nice house,” she said uncertainly. It was, but it felt like someone else's house. Wall-to-wall carpeting, soft beige plush, fine furniture, not quite antique, but not Grand Rapids either. A fully equipped kitchen, even a microwave, laundry room equipped… The problem was that she kept expecting the owners to enter momentarily and demand an explanation. Gray had walked to the front of the room and was looking out at the street, the driveway. She looked past him and saw the girl who had brought them here. The wind had started to blow, molding her jeans to her long legs, her hair against her cheeks. She glanced from her to Gray and thought clearly, of course, never an actress with her lovely face and body, but someone like that, someone loose-bodied and not beautiful and somehow free.

“Ready?” he asked, turning back to her.

She nodded. She couldn't tell if he had even been looking at the girl in the driveway, but if not now, later, another day. She did not try to rationalize her certainty. It came fully developed bearing its own load of acceptance and dread and inevitability.

Ginnie had the door open for them when they got back to her car. Her cheeks were bright from the wind, her hair tumbled every which way. When she started to drive, she asked, “Do you ski? Mount Ashland is wonderful for skiing, everything from cross-country to beginners' slopes to high-speed downhill.”

Neither of them skied. “The wind made me think of it,” Ginnie said. “There's been snow up in the mountains already, and the wind smells like warmed-over snow. We hardly ever get any down here, but sometimes you can smell it.”

Laura glanced at Gray. He shrugged, paying little attention to their guide, evidently not interested in her or her strange observations about weather.

Ginnie took them down the less-steep way and then on to their motel. She gave Gray the slip of paper with the phone number of Warner Furness and offered her services as chauffeur, guide, whatever they needed in the coming week or so until they got settled in. Gray thanked her politely and distantly; Laura forced a smile, and she left them alone.

“What do you think?” Ro asked her over the phone that night.

“You mean Gray and Laura?”

“You know that's what I mean. He didn't like the production, thought it was too draggy.”

“Well, so does Kirby,” she pointed out.

“Yeah, I know. Anyway, what do you think?”

“Too soon. Ask me in a couple of weeks. Has he told you the contest winner yet?”

There was a pause, then Ro said, “It's one called
The Climber
. Have you read it?”

“Nope. Didn't read any of them. Do you have a copy?”

“Just the file copy in the office. Juanita will run off some Xeroxes tomorrow. You want to read it in the office?”

She hesitated. Peter had asked her to go to Silver Lake with him over the weekend to a dig that had attracted students from the entire Northwest over the summer. Now that there were only professionals at the site, he was interested. She made up her mind suddenly. “I'll drop in tomorrow and read through it. You don't like it?”

“I don't know,” he said peevishly. “It's just not the one I would have picked, I guess. Anyway, read it and tell me what you think. See you tomorrow, honey.”

She called Peter and was a little surprised at how disappointed he sounded.

“I've been trying to get you off to myself for weeks,” he said, “and you keep dodging. Did Ro know ahead of time that you were considering going away?”

“I'm not sure. Why? What does that mean?”

“I bet he did.”

“Come back in time for the party, okay? Between eight and nine?

He said he would try and she knew he would make it. That was the only condition she had imposed, if she had gone at all, that they be back in time for the big party at the end of the season. Had she mentioned it to Uncle Ro? She thought not, but could not be certain, and even if she had, so what? Uncle Ro was not trying to run her life, she thought emphatically. If anything, he ignored her private life as if it didn't even exist.

If he asked if she was sleeping with Peter, would she tell him? she wondered. Probably. But she knew he would not ask any more than she would question him about his private life.

“Got a cup of coffee?” she called at his office door the next morning. It was raining and she felt smug about not being out camping at Silver Lake. The last time she and Peter had camped out in the rain, both sleeping bags had been soaked and he had caught a cold. She shrugged out of a poncho and held it at arm's length to drip in the hall, not on the office carpet.

“Hang it up somewhere,” Ro said, “and come on in. Come on. Such a mooch. Don't you buy any coffee of your own?”

“Hell no. How was dinner with Wonder Boy and the Lady of the Lake?”

He looked pained. “They were both pretty tired. They've taken the house and plan to move in today and he's going to take the trailer to Medford and turn it in and be back here in time for the matinee. Ginnie—” He paused and turned back to the coffee machine, looked at it instead of her. “Why'd you call her that?”

Ginnie had regretted the words as soon as she uttered them. She had not thought of Laura in any particular way since leaving her and Gray at the motel, had not thought about any title or nickname for her. The words had formed themselves in the shadows of the cave of her mind. “I don't know,” she said slowly. “I won't do it again.”

He nodded. “She's just tired from packing and the long drive, shy with so many strangers all at once. She'll be all right. And so will he.”

Ginnie sipped the coffee and knew why those particular words had come tumbling out. Laura had a doomed expression, a sad, aware, and doomed look.

“Well, here's the play,” Ro said, handing her a folder. “Take it over there and read through it. Juanita's coming in at ten to pick it up.”

His office was twenty feet long, only about ten feet wide. At one end was a mammoth desk, always messy with piles of papers, stacks of manuscripts, letters, a fifteen-inch-tall bronze clown, some pretty paperweights, things no one had touched in years, Ginnie felt certain. His secretary, Juanita Margolis, was forbidden to move anything there, but Ro could shuffle through things and come out with whatever it was he sought practically instantly. Everything else in the office was meticulously neat, as were his apartment, his person, his car, the rest of the theater. Only his desk was a rat's nest.

In the middle of the office, exactly in the way of traffic, there was a round table where Ro often ate lunch. He had not cooked a meal for himself in twenty-five years, except for toast once in a while. There were bookshelves, a neat liquor cabinet that opened to make a bar. At the far end there were comfortable overstuffed chairs covered in green leather and a matching couch. A redwood coffee table with a burl top, six feet by three, several inches thick, made the couch impossible to get to without great determination. There were windows on the outside wall, but Ginnie never had seen them open, or with the red velvet drapes drawn apart. It was always now in Ro's office, never day or night, or any time in particular, just now. It was not quite soundproof, but almost. She could faintly hear the noise of the crew onstage, getting set up for the matinee:
Pal Joey
.

She sat in one of the leather-covered chairs, put her feet on the coffee table, switched on a lamp, and opened the folder. The play had been written on a computer, printed in terrible purple dot matrix. She groaned. “I bet it won't reproduce at all,” she called.

He sighed. “We'll see.”

She knew what would happen. Juanita would end up retyping the whole damn thing and getting her own copy Xeroxed. Poor Juanita. She wondered what she would give up for Ro. Her arm. Her cats. Her mother. Whatever he demanded. She started to read.

When she finished she looked up to find him regarding her, frowning. “It's a piece of… Uncle Ro, it's awful.”

He let out a long breath. “I was hoping it was just me, out of touch or something.”

“There must have been something better than this. Do you have the other submissions handy?”

“He read them all. He was pretty emphatic about this being his choice.”

She dropped the manuscript on the coffee table and stood up. If Gray stuck to it, he would have this one. It was in his contract that he was to judge the contest. “What a stupid thing to agree to ahead of time anyway,” she said. “You should rewrite the contest rules. If there's nothing worth producing, nothing gets produced.”

“Meanwhile the horse is long gone.”

“Who wrote the goddamn thing? Maybe we could send him a mail bomb or something.”

“Her. Sunshine. That's all, just Sunshine.”

“Yeah, it would be. Boy, what a mess! Think we can talk him out of it?”

“We'll let it ride over the weekend and meet Monday. You, Eric, William, Juanita, Gray, and me. Ten Monday morning. “I'll hand out copies tonight or tomorrow. Don't let on that you've read it until then, Ginnie. I don't want any trouble over the weekend. God, I wish I could ask Kirby to come Monday.”

She agreed that he could not do that. Kirby was out as of Sunday; this was not his fight. She went to the door. “He must see something in it that we missed. I'll give it another good read over the weekend.”

“As I will, I assure you. Thanks, Ginnie. Just thanks.”

She grinned at him. “Wonder Boy just might shake things up around here more than you counted on, Uncle Ro.” When he had decided on Gray as Kirby's replacement, he had said the group needed new blood, needed a good shake-up. She thought that probably that was exactly what they were going to get.