The Humbling (4 page)

After Jerry had left, Axler went into his study and found his copy of
Long Day's Journey into Night.
He tried to read it but the effort was unbearable. He didn't get beyond page 4—he put Vincent Daniels's card there as a bookmark. At the Kennedy Center it was as though he'd never acted before and now it was as though he'd never read a play before—as though he'd never read
this
play before. The sentences unfolded without meaning. He could not keep straight who was speaking the lines. Sitting there amid his books, he tried to remember plays in which there is a character who commits suicide. Hedda in
Hedda Gabler,
Julie in
Miss Julie,
Phaedra in
Hippolytus,
Jocasta in
Oedipus the King,
almost everyone in
Antigone,
Willy Loman in
Death of a Salesman,
Joe Keller in
All My Sons,
Don Parritt in
The Iceman Cometh,
Simon Stimson in
Our
Town,
Ophelia in
Hamlet,
Othello in
Othello,
Cassius and Brutus in
Julius Caesar,
Goneril in
King Lear,
Antony, Cleopatra, Enobarbus, and Charmian in
Antony and Cleopatra,
the grandfather in
Awake and Sing!,
Ivanov in
Ivanov,
Konstantin in
The Seagull.
And this astonishing list was only of plays in which he had at one time performed. There were more, many more. What was remarkable was the frequency with which suicide enters into drama, as though it were a formula fundamental to the drama, not necessarily supported by the action as dictated by the workings of the genre itself. Deirdre in
Deirdre of the Sorrows,
Hedvig in
The Wild Duck,
Rebecca West in
Rosmersholm,
Christine and Orin in
Mourning Becomes Electra,
both Romeo and Juliet, Sophocles' Ajax. Suicide is a subject dramatists have been contemplating with awe since the fifth century
B.C.
, beguiled by the human beings who are capable of generating emotions that can inspire this most extraordinary act. He should set himself the task of rereading these plays. Yes, everything gruesome must be squarely faced. Nobody should be able to say that he did not think it through.

***

J
ERRY HAD BROUGHT
a manila envelope containing a handful of mail addressed to him in care of the Oppenheim Agency. There was a time when a dozen letters from fans would come to him that way every couple of weeks. Now these few were all that had arrived at Jerry's during the past half year. He sat in the living room idly tearing the envelopes open, reading each letter's first few lines and then balling the page up and throwing it onto the floor. They were all requests for autographed photos—all but one, which took him by surprise and which he read in its entirety.

"I don't know if you'll remember me," the letter began. "I was a patient at Hammerton. I had dinner with you several times. We were in art therapy together. Maybe you won't remember me. I have just finished watching a late-night movie on TV and to my amazement you were in it. You were playing a hardened criminal. It was so startling to see you on the screen, especially in such a menacing role. How different from the man I met! I remember telling you my story. I remember how you listened to me meal after meal. I couldn't stop talking. I was in agony. I thought my life was over. I wanted it to be over. You may not know it but your listening to my
story the way you did contributed to my getting through back then. Not that it's been easy. Not that it is now. Not that it ever will be. The monster I was married to has done ineradicable damage to my family. The disaster was worse than I knew when I was hospitalized. Terrible things had been going on for a long time without my knowing anything about them. Tragic things involving my little girl. I remember asking you if you would kill him for me. I told you I would pay. I thought because you were so big you could do it. Mercifully you didn't tell me that I was crazy when I said that but sat there listening to my madness as though I were sane. I thank you for that. But a part of me will never be sane again. It can't be. It couldn't be. It shouldn't be. Stupidly I sentenced the wrong person to death."

The letter went on, a single handwritten paragraph stretching loosely over three more big sheets of paper, and it was signed "Sybil Van Buren." He remembered listening to her story—summoning up his concentration and listening like that to someone other than himself was as close as he had come to acting in a long time and may even have helped
him
to recover. Yes, he remembered her and her story and her asking him to kill her husband, as though
he
were
a gangster in a movie rather than another patient in a psychiatric hospital who, big as he was, was as incapable as she of violently ending his own suffering with a gun. People go around killing people in movies all the time, but the reason they make all those movies is that for 99.9 percent of the audience it's impossible to do. And if it's that hard to kill someone else, someone you have every reason to want to destroy, imagine how hard it is to succeed in killing yourself.

H
E'D KNOWN PEGEEN'S
parents as good friends before Pegeen was born and had seen her first in the hospital as a tiny infant nursing at her mother's breast. They'd met when Axler and the newly married Staplefords—he from Michigan, she from Kansas—appeared together in a Greenwich Village church basement production of
Playboy of the Western World.
Axler had played the wonderfully wild lead role of Christy Mahon, the would-be parricide, while the female lead, Pegeen Mike Flaherty, the strong-minded barmaid in her father's pub on the west coast of County Mayo, had been played by Carol Stapleford, then two months pregnant with a first child; Asa Stapleford had played Shawn Keogh, Pegeen's betrothed. When the play's run ended, Axler had been at the closing-night party to cast his
vote for Christy as the name for a son and Pegeen Mike as the name for a daughter when the Staple-fords' baby arrived.

It was not likely—particularly as Pegeen Mike Stapleford had lived as a lesbian since she was twenty-three—that when she was forty years old and Axler was sixty-five they would become lovers who would speak on the phone every morning upon awakening and would eagerly spend their free time together at his house, where, to his delight, she appropriated two rooms for her own, one of the three bedrooms on the second floor for her things and the downstairs study off the living room for her laptop. There were fireplaces in all the downstairs rooms, even one in the kitchen, and when Pegeen was working in the study, she had a fire going all the time. She lived a little over an hour away, journeying along winding hilly roads that carried her across farm country to his fifty acres of open fields and the large old black-shuttered white farmhouse enclosed by ancient maples and big ashes and long, uneven stone walls. There was nobody but the two of them anywhere nearby. During the first few months they rarely got out of bed before noon. They couldn't leave each other alone.

Yet before her arrival he'd been sure he was finished: finished with acting, with women, with people, finished forever with happiness. He had been in serious physical distress for over a year, barely able to walk any distance or to stand or sit for very long because of the spinal pain that he'd put up with all his adult life but whose debilitating progress had accelerated with age—and so he was sure he was finished with everything. One of his legs would intermittently go dead so that he couldn't raise it properly while walking, and he would miss a step or a curb and fall, opening cuts on his hands and even landing on his face, bloodying his lip or his nose. Only a few months earlier his best and only local friend, an eighty-year-old judge who'd retired some years back, had died of cancer; as a result, though Axler had been based two hours from the city, amid the trees and fields, for thirty years—living there when he wasn't out somewhere in the world performing—he didn't have anyone with whom to talk or to eat a meal, let alone share a bed. And he was thinking again about killing himself as often as he had been before being hospitalized a year earlier. Every morning when he awoke to his emptiness, he determined he couldn't go another
day shorn of his skills, alone, workless, and in persistent pain. Once again, the focus was down to suicide; at the center of the dispossession there was only that.

On a frigid gray morning after a week of heavy snowstorms, Axler left the house for the carport to drive the four miles into town and stock up on groceries. Pathways around the house had been kept clear every day by a farmer who did his snowplowing for him, but he walked carefully nonetheless, wearing snow boots with thick treads and carrying a cane and taking tiny steps to prevent himself from slipping and falling. Under his layers of clothes his midsection was enveloped, for safety's sake, in a stiff back brace. As he started out of the house and headed for the carport he spotted a small long-tailed whitish animal standing in the snow between the carport and the barn. It looked at first like a very large rat, and then he realized, from the shape and color of the furless tail and from the snout, that it was a possum about ten inches long. Possums are ordinarily nocturnal, but this one, whose coat looked discolored and scruffy, was down on the snow-covered ground in broad daylight. As Axler approached, the possum waddled feebly off in the direction of the barn and then disappeared into a mound of snow up against the barn's stone foundation. He followed the animal—which was probably sick and nearing its end—and when he got to the mound of snow saw that there was an entry hole cleared at the front. Supporting himself with both hands on his cane, he kneeled down in the snow to peer inside. The possum had retreated too far back into the hole to be seen, but strewn about the front of the cave-like interior was a collection of sticks. He counted them. Six sticks. So that's how it's done, Axler thought. I've got too much. All you need are six.

The following morning while he was making his coffee, he saw the possum through the kitchen window. The animal was standing on its hind legs by the barn, eating snow from a drift, pushing gobs of it into its mouth with its front paws. Hurriedly he put on his boots and his coat, picked up his cane, went out the front door, and came around to the cleared path by the side of the house facing the barn. From some twenty feet away, he called across to the possum in full voice, "How would you like to
play James Tyrone? At the Guthrie." The possum just kept eating snow. "You'd be a wonderful James Tyrone!"

After that day, nature's little caricature of him came to an end. He never saw the possum again—either it disappeared or perished—though the snow cave with the six sticks remained intact until the next thaw.

T
HEN PEGEEN
stopped by. She phoned from the little house she'd rented a few miles from Prescott, a small, progressive women's college in western Vermont, where she'd recently taken a teaching job. He lived an hour west, across the state line in rural New York. It was twenty years or more since he'd seen her as a cheerful undergraduate traveling during her vacation with her mother and father. They'd be in his vicinity and stop off for a couple of hours to say hello. Every few years they all got together like that. Asa ran a regional theater in Lansing, Michigan, the town where he'd been born and raised, and Carol acted in the repertory company and taught an acting class at the state university. He'd seen Pegeen on another visit once before, a smiling, shy, sweet-faced kid of ten who'd climbed his trees and swum rapid laps in his pool, a skinny, athletic tomboy who laughed helplessly at all her father's jokes. And before that he'd seen her suckling on the maternity floor of St. Vincent's Hospital in New York.

Now he saw a lithe, full-breasted woman of forty, though with something of the child still in her smile—a smile in which she automatically raised her upper lip to reveal her prominent front teeth—and a lot of the tomboy still in her rocking gait. She was dressed for the countryside, in well-worn work boots and a red zippered jacket, and her hair, which he had incorrectly remembered as blond, like her mother's, was a deep brown and cut close to her skull, so short at the back as to appear clipped by a barber's trimmer. She had the invulnerable air of a happy person, and though her prototype was Rough Gamine, she spoke in an appealingly modulated voice, as if imitating her actress mother's diction.

As he would eventually learn, it had been some time since she'd had what she wanted rather than its grotesque inversion. She'd spent the last two years of a six-year affair suffering in a painfully lonely household in Bozeman, Montana. "The first four years," she told him one night after they'd become lovers, "Priscilla and I had this wonderfully cozy companionship. We used to go camping and hiking all the time, even when it snowed. In the summers we'd go off to places like Alaska and hike and camp up there. It was exciting. We went to New Zealand, we went to Malaysia. There was something childlike about us adventurously roaming around the world together that I loved. We were like two runaways. Then, starting around year five, she slowly drifted away into the computer, and I was left with no one to talk to except the cats. Until then we had done everything side by side. We'd be tucked up in bed, reading—reading to ourselves, reading passages aloud to each other; for such a long time there was the rapturous rapport. Priscilla would never tell people, 'I liked that book,' but rather, 'We liked that book,' or about some place, 'We liked going there,' or about our plans, 'That's what we're going to do this summer.' We. We. We. And then 'we' weren't we—we was over. We was she and her Mac. We was she and her festering secret that blotted out everything else—that she was going to mutilate the body I loved."

The two of them taught at the university in
Bozeman, and during their final two years as a couple, when Priscilla got home from work, she sat in front of her computer until it was time for bed. She spent her weekends in front of the computer. She ate and drank in front of the computer. There was no more talk, no more sex; even hiking and camping in the mountains Pegeen had to undertake on her own or with people other than Priscilla whom she rounded up for companionship. Then one day, six years after they'd met in Montana and pooled their resources and set themselves up as a couple, Priscilla announced that she had begun taking hormonal injections to promote facial hair growth and deepen her voice. Her plan was to have her breasts surgically removed and become a man. Alone, Priscilla admitted, she had been dreaming this up for a long time, and she would not turn back however much Pegeen pleaded. The very next morning Pegeen moved out of the house they jointly owned, taking with her one of the two cats—"Not so great for the cats," said Pegeen, "but that was the least of it"—and she settled into a room at a local motel. She could barely gather enough composure to meet with her classes. Lonely as it had become living with Priscilla, the wound of the betrayal, the nature
of the betrayal, was far worse. She cried all the time and began to write letters to colleges hundreds of miles from Montana looking for a new job. She went to a conference where colleges were interviewing people in environmental science and found a position in the East after sleeping with the dean, who became smitten by her and subsequently hired her. The dean was still Pegeen's devoted protector and paramour when Pegeen drove over to pay Axler a visit and determined that after seventeen years as a lesbian she wanted a man—this man, this actor twenty-five years her senior and her family's friend from decades back. If Priscilla could become a heterosexual male, Pegeen could become a heterosexual female.