The Night Listener and Others (6 page)

As I sat watching the two of them, I thought that the girl would make a stunning Blanche, visually at least. She seemed to have that elusive, fragile quality that Vivien Leigh exemplified so well in the film. I’d only seen Jessica Tandy, who’d originated the role, in still photos, but she always seemed too horsey-looking for my tastes. By no stretch of the imagination could Sheila Remarque be called horsey. She was exquisite porcelain, and I guess I must have become transfixed by her for a moment, for the next time I looked away from her toward Guy Taylor, he was staring at me with that same damned expressionless stare. I was irritated by the proprietary emotion I placed on his face, but found it so disquieting that I couldn’t glare back. So I looked at my script again.

After a few minutes, a fiftyish man I didn’t recognize came out and spoke to us. “Okay, Mr. Weidner will eliminate some of you without hearing you read. Those of you who make the final cut, be prepared to do one of two scenes. We’ll have the ladies who are reading for Blanche and you men reading for Mitch first. As you were told this morning: ladies, scene ten, guys six. Use your scripts if you want to. Not’s okay too. Let’s go.”

Seven women and fifteen men, me and Guy Taylor among them, followed the man into what used to be a ballroom. At one end of the high-ceilinged room was a series of raised platforms with a few wooden chairs on them. Ten yards back from this makeshift stage were four folding director’s chairs. Another five yards in back of these were four rows of ten each of the same rickety wooden chairs there were on the stage. We sat on these while Weidner, the director, watched us file in. “I’m sorry we can’t be in the theater,” he said, “but the set there now can’t be struck for auditions. We’ll have to make do here. Let’s start with the gentlemen for a change.”

He looked at the stage manager, who read from his clipboard, “Adams.”

That was me. I stood up, script in hand. Given a choice, I always held book in auditions. It gives you self-confidence, and if you try to go without and go up on the lines, you look like summer stock. Besides, that’s why they call them readings.

“Would someone be kind enough to read Blanche in scene six with Mr. Adams?” Weidner asked. A few girls were rash enough to raise their hands and volunteer for a scene they hadn’t prepared, but Weidner’s eyes fell instantly on Sheila Remarque. “Miss Remarque, isn’t it?” She nodded. “My congratulations on your Goneril. Would you be kind enough to read six? I promise I won’t let it color my impressions of your scene ten.”

Bullshit,
I thought, but she nodded graciously, and together we ascended the squeaking platform.

Have you ever played a scene opposite an animal or a really cute little kid? If you have, you know how utterly impossible it is to get the audience to pay any attention to you whatsoever. That was exactly how I felt doing a scene with Sheila Remarque. Not that my reading wasn’t good, because it was, better by far than I would have done reading with a prompter or an ASM, because she gave me something I could react to. She made Blanche so real that I had to be real too, and I was good.

But not as good as her. No way.

She used no book, had all the moves and lines down pat. But like I said of her Goneril, there was no
indication
of acting at all. She spoke and moved on that cheapjack stage as if she were and had always been Blanche DuBois, formerly of Belle Rêve, presently of Elysian Fields, New Orleans, in the year 1947. Weidner didn’t interrupt after a few lines, a few pages, the way directors usually do, but let the scene glide on effortlessly to its end, when, still holding my script, I kissed Blanche DuBois on “her forehead and her eyes and finally her lips,” and she sobbed out her line, “Sometimes—there’s God—so quickly!” and it was over and Blanche DuBois vanished, leaving Sheila Remarque and me on that platform with them all looking up at us soundlessly. Weidner’s smile was suffused with wonder. But not for me. I’d been good, but she’d been great.

“Thank you, Mr. Adams. Thank you very much. Nice reading. We have your resume, yes. Thank you,” and he nodded in a gesture of dismissal that took me off the platform. “Thank you too. Miss Remarque. Well done. While you’re already up there, would you care to do scene ten for us?”

She nodded, and I stopped at the exit. Ten was a hell of a scene, the one where Stanley and the drunken Blanche are alone in the flat, and I had to see her do it. I whispered a request to stay to the fiftyish man who’d brought us in, and he nodded an okay, as if speaking would break whatever spell was on the room. I remained there beside him.

“Our Stanley Kowalski was to be here today to read with the Blanches and Stellas, but a TV commitment prevented him,” Weidner said somewhat bitchily. “So if one of you gentlemen would be willing to read with Miss Remarque…”

There were no idiots among the men. Not one volunteered. “Ah, Mr. Taylor,” I heard Weidner say. My stomach tightened. I didn’t know whether he’d chosen Taylor to read with her out of sheer malevolence, or whether he was ignorant of their relationship, and it was coincidence—merely his spotting Taylor’s familiar face. Either way, I thought, the results could be unpleasant. And from the way several of the gypsies’ shoulders stiffened, I could tell they were thinking the same thing. “Would you please?”

Taylor got up slowly, and joined the girl on the platform. As far as I could see, there was no irritation in his face, nor was there any sign of dismay in Sheila Remarque’s deep, wet eyes. She smiled at him as though he were a stranger, and took a seat facing the “audience.”

“Anytime,” said Weidner. He sounded anxious. Not impatient, just anxious.

Sheila Remarque became drunk. Just like that, in the space of a heartbeat. Her whole body fell into the posture of a long-developed alcoholism. Her eyes blurred, her mouth opened, a careless slash across the ruin of her face, lined and bagged with booze. She spoke the lines as if no one had ever said them before, so any onlooker would swear that it was Blanche DuBois’s liquor-dulled brain that was creating them, and in no way were they merely words that had existed on a printed page for forty years, words filtered through the voice of a performer.

She finished speaking into the unseen mirror, and Guy Taylor walked toward her as Stanley Kowalski. Blanche saw him, spoke to him. But though she spoke to Stanley Kowalski, it was Guy Taylor who answered, only Guy Taylor reading lines, without a trace of emotion. Oh, the
expression
was there, the nuances, the rhythm of the lines, and their meaning was clear. But it was like watching La Duse play a scene with an electronic synthesizer. She destroyed him, and I thought back, hoping she hadn’t done the same to me.

This time Weidner didn’t let the scene play out to the end. I had to give him credit. As awful as Taylor was,
I
couldn’t have brought myself to deny the reality of Sheila Remarque’s performance by interrupting, but Weidner did, during one of Stanley’s longer speeches about his cousin who opened beer bottles with his teeth. “Okay, fine,” Weidner called out. “Good enough. Thank you, Mr. Taylor. I think that’s all we need see of you today.” Weidner looked away from him. “Miss Remarque, if you wouldn’t mind, I’d like to hear that one more time. Let’s see…Mr. Carver, would you read Stanley, please.” Carver, a chorus gypsy who had no business doing heavy work, staggered to the platform, his face pale, but I didn’t wait to see if he’d survive. I’d seen enough wings pulled off flies for one day, and was out the door, heading to the elevator even before Taylor had come off the platform.

I had just pushed the button when I saw Taylor, his dance bag over his shoulder, come out of the ballroom. He walked slowly down the hall toward me, and I prayed the car would arrive quickly enough that I wouldn’t have to ride with him. But the Ansonia’s lifts have seen better days, and by the time I stepped into the car he was a scant ten yards away. I held the door for him. He stepped in, the doors closed, and we were alone.

Taylor looked at me for a moment. “You’ll get Mitch,” he said flatly.

I shrugged self-consciously and smiled. “There’s a lot of people to read.”

“But they won’t read Mitch with
her.
And your reading
was
good.”

I nodded in agreement. “She helped.”

“May I,” he said after a pause, “give you some advice?” I nodded. “If they give you Mitch,” he said, “turn them down.”

“Why?” I asked, laughing.

“She’s sure to be Blanche. Don’t you think?”

“So?”

“You heard me read today.”

“So?”

“Have you seen me work?”

“I saw you in
Annie.
And in
Bus Stop
at ELT.”

“And?”

“You were good. Real good.”

“And what about today?”

I looked at the floor.

“Tell me.” I looked at him, my lips pinched. “Shitty,” he said. “Nothing there, right?”

“Not much,” I said.

“She did that. Took it from me.” He shook his head. “Stay away from her.

She can do it to you too.”

The first thing you learn in professional theater is that actors are children. I say that, knowing full well that I’m one myself. Our egos are huge, yet our feelings are as delicate as orchids. In a way, it stems from the fact that in other trades, rejections are impersonal. Writers aren’t rejected—it’s one particular story or novel that is. For factory workers, or white-collars, it’s lack of knowledge or experience that loses jobs. But for an actor, it’s the way he looks, the way he talks, the way he moves that make the heads nod yes or no, and that’s rejection on the most deeply personal scale, like kids calling each other nickel-nose or fatso. And often that childish hurt extends to other relationships as well. Superstitious? Imaginative? Ballplayers have nothing on us. So when Taylor started blaming Sheila Remarque for his thespian rockslide, I knew it was only because he couldn’t bear to admit that it was
he
who had let his craft slip away, not the girl who had taken it from him.

The elevator doors opened, and I stepped off. “Wait,” he said, coming after me. “You don’t believe me.”

“Look, man,” I said, turning in exasperation, “I don’t know what went on between you and her and I don’t care, okay? If she messed you over, I’m sorry, but I’m an actor and I need a job and if I get it I’ll
take
it!”

His face remained placid. “Let me buy you a drink,” he said.

“Oh Jesus…”

“You don’t have to be afraid. I won’t get violent.” He forced a smile. “Do you think I’ve
been
violent? Have I even raised my voice?”

“No.”

“Then please. I just want to talk to you.”

I had to admit to myself that I
was
curious. Most actors would have shown more fire over things that meant so much to them, but Taylor was strangely zombielike, as if life were just a walk-through. “All right,” I said, “all right.”

We walked silently down Broadway. By the time we got to Charlie’s it was three thirty, a slow time for the bar. I perched on a stool, but Taylor shook his head. “Table,” he said, and we took one and ordered. It turned out we were both bourbon drinkers.

“Jesus,” he said after a long sip. “It’s cold.”

It was. Manhattan winters are never balmy, and the winds that belly through the streets cut through anything short of steel.

“All right,” I said. “We’re here. You’re buying me a drink. Now. You have a story for me?”

“I do. And after I tell it you can go out and do what you like.”

“I intend to.”

“I won’t try to stop you,” he went on, not hearing me. “I don’t think I could even if I wanted to. It’s your life, your career.”

“Get to the point.”

“I met her last summer. June. I know Joe Papp, and he invited me to the party after the
Lear
opening, so I went. Sheila was there with a guy, and I walked up and introduced myself to them, and told her how much I enjoyed her performance. She thanked me, very gracious, very friendly, and told me she’d seen me several times and liked my work as well. I thought it odd at the time, the way she came on to me. Very strong, with those big, wet, bedroom eyes of hers eating me up. But her date didn’t seem to care. He didn’t seem to care about much of anything. Just stood there and drank while she talked, then sat down and drank some more. She told me later, when we were together, that he was a poet. Unpublished, of course, she said. She told me that his work wasn’t very good technically, but that it was very emotional. ‘Rich with feeling,’ were the words she used.

“I went to see her in
Lear
again, several times really, and was more impressed with each performance. The poet was waiting for her the second time I went, but the third, she left alone. I finessed her into a drink, we talked, got along beautifully. She told me it was all over between her and the poet, and that night she ended up in my bed. It was good, and she seemed friendly, passionate, yet undemanding. After a few more dates, a few more nights and mornings, I suggested living together, no commitments. She agreed, and the next weekend she moved in with me.

“I want you to understand one thing, though. I never loved her. I never told her I loved her or even suggested it. For me, it was companionship and sex, and that was all. Though she was good to be with, nice to kiss, to hold, to share things with, I never loved her. And I know she never loved me.” He signaled the waiter and another drink came. Mine was still half full. “So I’m not a…a victim of unrequited love, all right? I just want you to be sure of that.” I nodded and he went on.

“It started a few weeks after we were living together. She’d want to play games with me, she said. Theater games. You know, pretend she was doing something or say something to get a certain emotion out of me. Most of the time she didn’t let me know right away what she was doing. She’d see if she could get me jealous, or mad, or sullen. Happy too. And then she’d laugh and say she was just kidding, that she’d just wanted to see my reactions. Well, I thought that was bullshit. I put it down as a technique exercise rather than any method crap, and in a way I could understand it—wanting to be face to face with emotions to examine them—but I still thought it was an imposition on me, an invasion of my privacy. She didn’t do it often, maybe once or twice a week. I tried it on her occasionally, but she never bit, just looked at me as if I were a kid trying to play a man’s game.