Stages (15 page)

The stagehand reached down, picked up Melanie’s feeler, and very gently pressed it to her forehead. It stuck for a second and then flopped to the floor again.

“Smile,” said the stagehand.

Melanie looked at this guy who was being so sweet to her,
really
looked at him, and all of a sudden she didn’t have to make herself smile.

“You’re very kind,” Melanie said. “What’s your name?”

“Brett,” said the stagehand.

“I’m Melanie—what’s left of me is, anyway. I’ve got to get to makeup. Lucille’s probably back already with her Alka-Seltzer.”

“Pepto-Bismol.”

“Pepto-Bismol…look, maybe I’ll see you later.”

“Later,” Brett replied with a grin.

Later
was right after the fifty-two takes it took to get the commercial done to Ed and Sid’s satisfaction. At the end Melanie felt every bit as spent and hollowed out as the cardboard inside the roll of toilet paper that had first occurred to her as the definitive interpretation of this particular part.

When Brett walked over to her and asked her how she was doing, she mentioned the cardboard. And he said to her, “You know, if you make a hole in one of those with a pencil, and stick a joint in it, it makes a pretty good pipe.”

“Really,” said Melanie, “I’ve never tried that.”

“Want to?” Brett asked.

28

James was having lunch in the cafeteria with Cohen from the English department and Greenwood, who was a sociologist. Cohen was a Faulkner specialist, who had written a novel of his own, which was totally autobiographical and unpublishable. James could say of Cohen’s experience what he’d often felt about himself—it’s a life, but it’s not much of a story.

Cohen as usual was talking about coeds. He’d caught a glimpse of the breast of one of his particular favorites through the armhole of her blouse as she was reaching for a book on a shelf.

“What a body,” he was saying. “There’s nobody like her.”

“Yah,” said Greenwood. “She’s a frigid bitch. Like her friend Judy Halstead.”

Cohen chuckled. Leaning forward conspiratorially, he whispered, “You think Judy Halstead is frigid? Well, you’re wrong. In point of fact I personally have hugged and kissed Judy Halstead. In my office.”

“You have?” Greenwood said with mild surprise. Squeezing his tea bag, he added, “If you’re going to hug and kiss a student, I suppose that is the way to do it—personally.”

James stirred his gelatinous chop suey. “Isn’t Judy Halstead on the field hockey team?” he asked.

“She’s captain of it,” Cohen replied. “Also she’s chairman of the student disciplinary board.”

“Discipline?” Greenwood said sweetly.

“Is it ever really worth it, I wonder?” James said. “Getting involved with a student, I mean?”

“You tell us,” Greenwood said.

“I don’t think it is,” James replied. “They’re so much younger than we are. Their bodies are developed, but they’re not capable of—what can I call it?—depth of feeling, maybe, emotional sympathy, long-term relationships.”

“A father figure isn’t forever,” said Greenwood.

“It can happen,” James replied.

“Not often. The Durants were a fluke,” Greenwood said. “Feh. December is December and May is May. Let’s face it, it’s almost impossible to have any kind of a relationship with someone who’s just starting their life when you’re at the stage where you’re trying to figure out what happened to yours.”

“Speak for yourself, Clyde,” said Cohen. “I’ve got an appointment with a student in five minutes. She wants to talk about Emily Dickinson. You never know where Emily Dickinson is going to lead you. She and Sylvia Plath. Loneliness and insanity, that’s what makes them want to reach out to you.”

James had no appointments. As his colleagues got up from the table, he leaned on it, squeezing his eyelids with his fingers. He felt utterly worn out.

“I think this student I’m seeing really is a possibility,”

Cohen was saying. “Janet Hunt’s her name. She’s a real hippie, doesn’t wear a bra, which is a good sign, and there was a rumor she was along with that radical group that trashed Hamilton’s office.”

“I doubt she’s into discipline, then,” Greenwood said.

“We’ll see,” said Cohen.

*

James had slowly made his way back to his office, where he was listening now, for perhaps the twenty-fifth time, to Lauren’s last tape. It began with “I’m sorry” and ended, five minutes later, with “I really am.” Between her apologies she talked about what a growing experience it had been for her, and how people change.

As the tape played, James stared out the window. He saw a hippie girl, who appeared to be muttering to herself, charging across the quadrangle. She looked a little like Janis Joplin, the singer his son was so crazy about. James didn’t understand how a woman with a face like that could appeal to anyone. You just knew that something in her wanted to squeeze men like blackheads.

When the tape ended, James got up to go to the bathroom.

His urine was the same color as the Rose’s lime juice he used to make his occasional vodka gimlets. That was because of the vitamins his wife was making him take after reading Linus Pauling. Over his own splashing James could hear the shrieks of Anderson’s opera, which was in rehearsal on the floor below.

He flushed the urinal, and was as relieved when its churning drowned out the dreadful singing as he’d felt peeing.

Little reliefs. And they were about it, the most he could hope for at this stage of the game.

James looked in the mirror. He was getting jowls. Lately his skin felt suspended from his bones, the net under the tightrope act.

Anyplace my blood pressure doesn’t make me red, I’m gray,
he thought
.

Downstairs the piano was banging.

James heard some ugly high notes, and familiar lyrics.

“I am blind to what they say is my shame

I see but what’s lit by my passion’s flame.”

29

Brett’s apartment was on the third floor of a tenement building that overlooked Abingdon Square—a cemented-over park that was little more than a traffic island.

The stairs they had to climb reminded Melanie of the ones in her own place. They were narrow, often lopsided, and covered with linoleum as eroded as the soles of a bum’s shoes.

On Brett’s door was a peace symbol, partly ripped off. Under it someone had scrawled in ballpoint, “Footprint of an American chicken.” The door opened into a short hallway with a bathroom off it. More or less against one wall was a kitchen area with open shelves and a dish rack full of mismatched china, juice bottles, and silverware. Beyond the kitchen was a living room with a slice of bedroom beside it. The bedroom was stuffed with an oak dresser and hanging clothes.

One wall of Brett’s little living room was record albums, and between them was a stereo receiver and two bulky speakers. Against the opposite wall there was a brown Naugahyde sleep sofa. A table and two rattan chairs were by the windows. Brett had thumbtacked a dayglo poster of Jimi Hendrix to another wall. Beside it was a caricature of a creature that looked like a malignant pudding. The caption on it was “Mayor Daley for heart donor.”

“Oh, what a wonderful poster,” Melanie said. “I have a friend who’d love it. She was nearly killed by the pigs. In Chicago. She was working for the McCarthy campaign.”

“Looks a lot like him, doesn’t it?” Brett said. “You want a beer?”

“Thanks,” said Melanie. “I’d love one.”

“Have a seat. Make yourself comfortable,” Brett said as he rummaged in the refrigerator.

She sat down on the sofa. It had been patched in places with masking tape. Brett’s guitar was leaning against one of the stereo speakers. It was shield shaped, with knobs like a radio’s on it.

“That’s a nice guitar,” Melanie said as Brett handed her a Bud.

“Yeah, it’s a good one,” Brett said, sitting on the sofa beside her. “It’s a Gibson. It was made in 1957.”

“How long have you been playing?” Melanie asked.

“Since I was fourteen.”

“I never did learn to play an instrument,” Melanie said. “Or to ice-skate. And now that I’m an actress, I’m even more limited. It’s that way in the music business too, isn’t it? I mean, musicians are only interested in their music, basically, where their next gig is going to be. Like dancers are only interested in dancing. I have a friend who’s a ballet dancer, and she can’t even listen to music on the radio without wondering whether or not it’s
danceable.
”

Brett nodded thoughtfully. “Actors and musicians aren’t any different. Funny when you spend so much time not working, that it’s still a full-time job in your head.”

“Are you very political?” Melanie asked. “Do you go on any of the peace marches, or anything?”

“I was at Woodstock,” Brett replied.

“I don’t know if that counts,” Melanie said. “Sometimes I feel guilty that I don’t do more than just stand around Central Park whenever there’s something going on. It seems like I’m always too far away to hear any of the speeches. Really it’s the rock stars who’ve helped the antiwar movement the most. Except for Mick Jagger at Altamont. I guess music is more immediate than acting, more involved. Well, anyway, I try to do what I can for the peace movement. I talk back to hardhats. I smoke dope.”

“You want to smoke some now?” Brett asked. “Or would you like to try this terrific acid I got last week?”

“Gee,” said Melanie. “I haven’t done any acid since I don’t know when. A year ago? Yeah, I think it was New Year’s, 1971.”

“This is absolutely the best blotter acid,” Brett said. “Windowpane.”

“Not cut with speed or anything, huh?”

“Nope, this is really pure stuff.”

“You said we were going out for a pizza later?”

“Yeah. If you feel like it.”

“Well, tripping out for eight hours is a good way to work up an appetite. And it’s not as if I have to be up bright and early in the morning for my appointment with Sue Mengers. Okay. If you say it’s that good, I’ll try it.”

“Believe me, you’ll like it,” Brett said, getting up from the sofa. He went into the kitchen and came back with a small piece of tinfoil.

“What if I freak out?” Melanie asked. “What if I start climbing the walls, screaming that my agent’s taken ten percent of my mind?”

“Have you ever had a bad trip?” Brett replied.

“No,” said Melanie, “I haven’t. But there’s always a first time, isn’t there?”

“I don’t think you have to worry about it if you’re a together person,” Brett said as he unwrapped the foil packet. “Most of the people who freak out on acid are fucked up anyway. The acid brings to the surface all the shit they’ve repressed, and then they can’t deal with it. It’s not the drug, it’s what the drug uncovers. Here you go,” Brett said. He handed Melanie a piece of paper a quarter the size of a stamp.

She put it on her tongue and then swallowed it with some beer.

“It always goes down a little strangely,” she said, gulping.

“Drink some more beer,” Brett said. He’d swallowed his own tab without any difficulty.

“It’ll probably be an hour before we feel anything, right?” Melanie said.

“Yeah, about an hour,” said Brett.

“Good,” Melanie replied. “That gives me just enough time to bring to the surface everything I’ve been repressing lately, so there won’t be any danger of me freaking out. Would you have a piece of paper so I can make a list?”

“Sure,” Brett said. He went over to the record albums and fished around underneath them in a white cabinet that was smudged with fingerprints. He found a pad and pencil, gave them to Melanie, and sat down with her.

“Okay, what you been keepin’ bottled up inside you?” he asked. Melanie wrote something down, and he looked over her shoulder.

“Fear of violence?” he said.

“Yes,” said Melanie. “Ever since my friend Kathy came to see me—she’s the one who the cops beat up during the Chicago riots. When I saw her after that, her arm was still in a sling. I made us this big pot of spaghetti, and the two of us sat there eating it at my kitchen table and crying. With the tears running down our cheeks and pasta dangling out of our mouths. She was crying because it was so terrible for her to talk about what had happened, and I was crying because I felt so sorry for her, and also I was scared shitless….
”

“What were you scared of?” Brett asked.

“I don’t know,” Melanie said. “Kathy nearly got killed once before, when we were in college. She got cracked in the head playing softball. It was such a crazy, unpredictable thing. But you can never predict when something violent is going to happen to you, can you? God follows all our movements…and He has a flyswatter.”

“I never thought about it,” Brett said.

“Men take violence for granted,” Melanie went on. “But there’s something in women that…shrinks from it. I guess you could say that being a soldier is the exact opposite of being a mother. And hunting an animal is the opposite of nursing a baby. I don’t know. There are so many things I don’t understand but just see the results of. Maybe you can tell me. When a cop kicks a woman, is it because he really hates her or because of something else?”