Only Love Can Break Your Heart (29 page)

I had no trouble believing Patricia would say something like that.

“Do you know what she said to me then?” Leigh asked.

I didn’t answer; I had grown somewhat distracted by the thought of Patricia in the audience at the debut performance of
Equus
. Did she know the play? She must have—it was just her sort of thing. Would it stir anything in her to see me act out the role of the lovesick stable boy?

Leigh kept talking. My thoughts were elsewhere, but I was paying just enough attention to hear something that stunned me—something so unbelievable I had to ask Leigh to repeat the words in case I’d misunderstood what she’d said.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “What did she say?”

“She was very sweet,” Leigh murmured. “Very contrite.”

“Could you say it again, please?” I asked.

Leigh sighed as if exasperated.

“You should pay better attention, Rocky,” she said. “She told me, ‘You know, Leigh, it’s as if I’m the devil and you’re the sacrificial lamb.’ ”

28

MY MOTHER RETURNED FROM
signing forms. Leigh had drifted over to the window, where she stood gazing out at the gray sky over the parking lot.

“Tell her, Leigh,” I said.

“Tell her what?” said Leigh.

“What is it?” my mother asked.

I blurted out what Leigh had told me about her conversation with Patricia.

“Is this true, honey?” my mother asked. “Did she say those things to you?”

Leigh nodded.

“What do you think it means?” Leigh asked.

“I don’t know,” my mother said. “Did you tell the police about this?”

“No,” Leigh said. “She only left my house an hour ago. I came straight here. I just felt terrible.”

“About what?” my mother asked.

“About not being here to read to Mr. Askew,” she said.

My mother looked like she wanted to scream.

“Well, I think you should tell the police that she said that to you, Leigh,” my mother said. “I think we should go there and tell them right now.”

“All right,” Leigh said with a drowsy shrug. “If you think so.”

I rode in the backseat while Leigh sat up front next to my mother. Her head was tilted gently toward the blur of the landscape and the buildings lining Memorial Avenue as the car sped toward Randolph High School. When we arrived, my mother parked in front of the annex and led Leigh up to the door, with me following behind. We were met there by the same brawny deputy who had accompanied Bobby Carwile when he came to the hospital to pick up Paul.

“I’m sorry, ma’am,” the deputy said. “I can’t let y’all in.”

“Miss Bowman here has something important to tell Mr. Carwile,” my mother said. “Is he around?”

The deputy asked us to wait outside. A moment later, Bobby Carwile appeared.

“Tell him, Leigh,” my mother said. “Tell him what she told you.”

“Who told you what, Miss Bowman?” Carwile said.

“It might be nothing,” Leigh said. “Just something Patricia said.”

“Now, Miss Bowman, I’m not sure your daddy will like it much if he finds out you’ve been talking to me without your lawyer,” Carwile said.

“You’re going to want to hear this, Mr. Carwile,” my mother said.

“All right then,” he said. “Come on in, Miss Bowman.”

“I’m coming with you,” said my mother.

“I can’t let you do that, Mrs. Askew,” Carwile said.

“It’s all right,” Leigh said. “I want her there.”

Carwile appeared to consider the request.

“You can’t see Paul,” he said. “And he’ll have to stay out here.”

Carwile nodded at me.

“Why?” I said.

“All right,” my mother replied.

She started through the door and then stopped and turned to me.

“Don’t be late,” she said. “Rex is depending on you.”

“Are you serious?” I said.

She kissed me on the cheek.

“Break a leg,” she said.

INSIDE THE THEATER,
I found Cinnamon backstage, smoking a cigarette with Marcus Vaughan and Todd Ackley, the stage manager.

“Hey,” she said. “You’re early.”

I told Cinnamon what Leigh had said about Patricia, and what had happened afterward.

“Wow,” Cinnamon said. “That’s creepy.”

“I’m sure it doesn’t mean anything,” I said.

“Maybe it does,” she said.

I shrugged my shoulders, afraid to hope.

“We were just going to get something to eat,” Marcus said. “You guys want to come?”

“Sure,” Cinnamon said.

When we walked out to the parking lot, my mother’s car was still there in front of the annex.

“That’s a good sign, right?” Cinnamon said.

We rode in Todd’s car over to McDonald’s. I didn’t have any money, so Cinnamon bought me a Quarter Pounder with Cheese. I wasn’t hungry but ate anyway, knowing the long night I had ahead of me. When we were finished eating, the three of them smoked cigarettes, flicking their ashes into one of those flimsy aluminum ashtrays stamped with the golden arches. Afterward we killed time driving around in Todd’s car, listening to music. When we arrived back at Randolph, my mother’s car was gone.

Backstage, we found the rest of the cast in the green room, huddled together, pale with nerves. Even the usually boisterous Blake Burwell sat silently in a motley leather club chair, chewing his fingernails.

“What are you worried about?” Cinnamon said. “All you have to do is stand there clenching your butt.”

I left to go to my dressing room. Marcus Vaughan was already there, applying the makeup that was supposed to make him look like a shrink nearing the end of middle age. On the dressing table in front of him sat a vase filled with red roses and baby’s breath.

“My parents,” he said. “You’ve got something also.”

He pointed to my side of the table, where I saw an unmarked envelope underneath a hard pack of Camel Lights.

“I didn’t think you smoked,” Marcus said.

“I don’t,” I replied. “It’s an inside joke.”

“Oh,” he said.

“Well, I’m heading out. See you in a few.”

“OK,” I said.

After Marcus had left, I picked up the envelope. I recognized my name written in Paul’s sloppy script. I took out the letter and began to read.

Rocky,

Funny, right? Sorry for the lousy gift. It’s the best I could do. Give them to Cinnamon—we need to get her smoking a classier brand.

Sorry I won’t be there to see the show. With a little luck, I’ll get out in time to catch the last performance. Rayner says they’ve got nothing on me. He’s the lawyer, right?

I’m sure you’re wondering what’s been going on in here. It’s not so bad. They ask the same questions, I give the same answers. Mostly I just sit around reading. Rayner brought me a stack of books and a carton of cigs. If I had a turntable and a window to stare out of, it’d be just like home.

Cinnamon gave Rayner a copy of your play to pass on to me. I’m not sure I understood it. But one part stuck with me. When Alan’s mother comes to see the shrink at the beginning of act 2, she says, “Every soul is itself.” I know the mother is supposed to be nuts, but that seemed like a pretty good way of looking at things. “Every soul is itself.” I couldn’t say it any better.

—Paul

I placed the letter on the table and looked up at the mirror. I stared at myself for what seemed like a long time. I tried to remember what Paul had looked like when he was my age, searched for the traces of his features in my face, looking for our common inheritance—the evidence, as it were, of our connection. I thought of myself at nine years old. I wondered what I must have looked like to him on that cold spring night standing in front of Twin Oaks beneath those two great trees, tall and forbidding in the darkness.

I was still there when Cinnamon came in, dressed in her frumpy schoolmarm’s costume. Without a word, she wrapped her arms around me and held me there until I stopped shaking.

WHEN I HAD
collected myself, we went out to the wings. We found my mother and Leigh in the center of the tenth row.

“You see?” Cinnamon said. “They made it.”

“But no Paul,” I said.

“Maybe tomorrow. Oh, God,” Cinnamon said.

“What is it?” I asked.

“They came,” she said.

“Who?”

“My parents.”

I had never seen Cinnamon’s parents before. I had begun to wonder whether they even existed, but there they were: a tall, slim man with high cheekbones, a shock of salt-and-pepper hair, and a full gray beard that spread out from his face and descended to his collar, accompanied by a shorter, heavyset woman in a billowing floral-print dress, her long, dark hair tied up in a loose, messy bun at the base of her neck. They didn’t look like anyone from Boone’s Ferry but seemed somehow less eccentric than advertised.

Having been so preoccupied with studying Cinnamon’s parents, I didn’t notice until I looked back toward Leigh and my mother that Patricia Culver had entered the auditorium and taken a seat a few rows behind them. Next to her sat Nelson Waltrip. Together they looked like a frosty shrew and her troublesome nephew, sent out with Auntie to get a little culture.

Behind us, we heard the voice of Mr. LaPage.

“Two minutes to curtain, lovebirds,” he said. “Let’s go.”

I walked out onto the stage. The houselights fell, the curtain rose, and there I was standing under a single spotlight, my head tilted against Blake Burwell’s shoulder.

As the play progressed, whenever I found myself in the shadows between my scenes, with Marcus off to the side reciting Dysart’s gloomy monologues, I closed my eyes and thought of Paul, alone in the field house annex with Cinnamon’s tattered copy of
Equus
, reading along. I felt as if I were performing for him—or at least for my memory of him. I realized then that, in a certain sense, it was Paul and not me who most resembled Alan Strang. At some point, every boy feels the urge to lash out at something, to be cruel and violent, to curse the world for its frail humanity. But only a few have the will—be it born of courage or recklessness, folly or sublime wisdom—to act and, by their action, transform themselves. They will pay for their courage, of course; the world does not treat its
others
lightly. But so will the rest of us—the ones who love them—haunted as we are by our envy of their bright, burning beauty, which we can bear neither to look at nor to turn away from.

By the end of the first act, the mood in the theater had become palpably tense. Something strange and unexpected was coming over us all. This weird, ill-chosen play, which so many of the virtuous denizens of our priggish little town would have considered “indecent” and “inappropriate for children,” had transformed into a vehicle for a collective act of catharsis. Even Cinnamon, the queen of detachment, was swept up in the communal rite of expiation. As the second act began and we played out the final, bitter confrontation between mother and son, Cinnamon’s usually stiff, almost comical line readings became abruptly natural and filled with urgent sincerity.

In the scene, the psychiatrist Dysart walks in to find Dora Strang upbraiding Alan. The mother has come not to visit her son but rather to be exonerated—to be reassured that she is not responsible for the boy’s shocking, senseless violence or for his madness. Alan Strang gives her no such satisfaction—just a stony stare of silent, sneering contempt.

“Don’t you dare give me that stare, young man!” Cinnamon wailed.

The script called for her to slap me at that point. We had practiced the slap so frequently and playfully that I no longer flinched. This time, however, her hand whipped out with stunning force. The sound of the contact echoed through the theater. Someone gasped (probably my mother). I felt a stinging welt begin to rise on my face.

“Don’t you dare,” she said again, more softly.

Marcus Vaughan entered from stage right. The pillar of light moved away from me. I stood still in the darkness as Cinnamon argued with Marcus, the bitterness in her voice rising with its pitch.

“Whatever’s happened has happened
because of Alan
,” she said. “Alan is himself. Every soul is itself. If you added up everything we ever did to him, from his first day on earth to this, you wouldn’t find why he did this terrible thing—because that’s
him
.”

I glanced out into the audience and found my mother. I recalled how often she had made similar speeches to my father about Paul—the “born manipulator,” the “bad kid.” I wondered whether she felt Paul’s presence hovering over the whole proceeding, as I did.

Not long after Dora Strang’s final words to Dysart, Alan meets Jill—like Patricia, a seductress, though one who has no other motive, literally, than a roll in the hay. As the flirtation and the overtures continued, my eyes kept drifting away from Becky and out into the house, where Patricia sat watching as I reenacted our private history in front of an unwitting audience.

“Take your sweater off,” Becky said.

“What?” I replied. It was my line—no problem there—but I was asking the question sincerely, as if I had forgotten where I was and what I was supposed to do.

“I will if you will,” Becky said.

I pulled the sweater over my head and dropped it. We kissed lightly and then awkwardly descended to the floor together.

Since all the scenes leading up to the maiming of the horses are recalled from the recesses of Alan’s memory in a therapy session, Dysart is also onstage, conversing with Alan as the action takes place. The critical moment involves Alan’s hearing the stamping of horses’ hooves beneath him and sensing the disapproving glare of his imaginary horse-god, Equus.

“When I shut my eyes, I saw Him at once,” I said to Marcus.

As I loomed over Becky Mayhew, describing the vision of a foamy horse’s hide replacing the nape of the beautiful girl in repose, I saw neither Becky nor Equus but instead Patricia Culver, looking up at me from a blue plaid blanket.

“NO!” I cried, leaping up and backing away. “Get out,” I said, less forcefully at first than I was supposed to. I repeated the words, louder. Becky fled the stage. I mimed the blinding of Blake Burwell and the rest of the horses and then fell to the floor as the horror-movie sound track of stamping hooves echoed through the theater. The shame and wrath were genuine. Rex LaPage had been right all along: Everything in life is performance. And the performance is life.

Marcus Vaughan spoke the final lines. The stage went black. When the lights came up, the lot of us stood spread out across the stage, Marcus Vaughan and I at the center, flanked by Blake and Becky and Cinnamon and the others as we took our bows. The audience looked a bit shell-shocked but managed to summon a round of generous if not rousing applause. A scattered few rose to their feet, clapping slowly and steadily, as if unsure what had so moved them.

When the curtain fell, LaPage met me at center stage.

“My God, Richard,” LaPage said.

He didn’t have to say anything else. Looking back, I know that it wasn’t technically the best performance I ever gave, but sometimes it doesn’t matter—something just happens, and while the performer can never be completely delivered forever from his own limitations, he is, however briefly, lifted above the world.