Stages (30 page)

A gull picked a twist of lemon out of an empty glass and flew away with it.

“Still hanging around the theater, huh? Hey, how about what’s happened to Paula Rubin?”

“It’s incredible, isn’t it? The most amazing thing is she’ll take a supporting role rather than a lead, and then she walks away with the picture anyway. I’m waiting for her to get handed a bad script. I remember her as being human. I’d like to think that I was right.”

“We’re all human,” said Eric. He motioned with his blue drink at a man standing nearby. “Except for bodybuilders,” he added.

“So who are you staying with?” Mike asked.

“An interior decorator. I did the flower arrangements for a photo spread of a house he did in Society Hill. They brought in flowers, vases, rugs, furniture, everything, just for the day. It’ll all go into
Better Homes and Gardens,
and people will think that’s the way these people actually live, but it isn’t. Half of the stuff the furniture manufacturers supply, to get the credits.”

“It’s all just a stage setting, huh?” Mike said.

“Pretty much,” said Eric.

“See, we never really get away from theater, do we?” Mike said. “All the world’s a stage. Fun, isn’t it?”

“I’m on the verge of having a good time.”

“Are you…like really
tied
to your host?”

“My
host
is Rafael Santos. He loses track of people, he’s known for that.”

“Oh, yeah,” said Mike. “I know who he is. I see the maid walking his two Yorkies.”

“So, lemme buy you a drink,” said Eric, looking down at his own empty glass.

“I was just going to ask you if you wanted one,” Mike said.

The two young men smiled at each other. The disco music throbbed in the background. And overhead the gulls circled, waiting to snatch at opportunity.

50

It was Thursday, the servants’ day off. Violet, Jack’s day nurse, was surveying the tennis court from a window. Mrs. Case was about halfway through her lesson, according to Violet’s watch. True to form, she and that gigolo of hers were playing in the guest house instead of on the clay. Violet was very annoyed. Mr. Case needed a new prescription, and clearly it was unlikely that anyone was going to be able to go and pick up the pills anytime soon. She would have to drive to the drugstore herself.

“Mr. Case,” Violet said, turning away from the window, “it looks like I’m going to have to go and pick up your pills. You’ll be all right by yourself here for a little while, won’t you?”

Jack waved his good hand as if to send her on her way.

“I won’t be long,” Violet said. “You want me to move you someplace or are you comfortable where you are?”

Jack flicked his hand again. Violet put on her hat.

“Your wife will probably be through with her tennis anytime now,” she said. She looked out the window as she spoke, and crossed her eyes contemptuously.

“If you want anything, you can just call the guest house…and they’ll hear it on the court,” she added as she left the bedroom. Violet hurried downstairs, went out the front door, and got into her cream-colored Maverick.

As the Maverick’s tires grated over the crushed marble in the Cases’ driveway, a brand-new red Ferrari was burbling out of a driveway in the town of Wilton, a few miles away. The Ferrari’s tires squealed as Jason punched the gearshift from reverse to first and stepped on the gas. Beside him was Lauren, her face radiant.

“Let’s not have an accident on the way there,” she said to her husband.

“They’re gonna go
nuts
,”
he said excitedly. “Especially my mother.”

In the master bedroom of the mansion on the Sound, Jack was moving his good hand toward the switch that moved his electrically powered wheelchair forward. He pushed it, and rolled out of the bedroom into the hallway. Struggling against the dead weight of his own body, Jack maneuvered himself into the elevator. After a few seconds, the elevator’s door slid open on the ground floor. It started to close on one of the wheels of Jack’s chair, then opened again.

He had waited a long time for this opportunity. Now he was determined to go through with it, to succeed, to free himself once and for all from the trap of his own body. They all thought he was helpless, especially his wife, but he wasn’t, not quite. One last time he would be what he had been, a man able to control his life. By the strength of his will and nothing more. He would reclaim his life as his and his alone.

Jack’s wheelchair spilled off the ramp that inclined from the terrace to the garden. It moved along the walk of herringbone brick with a hum as Jack guided himself—feeling guided, almost as though his father’s hand were there on his shoulder.

Out on the highway, Violet’s Maverick and Jason’s Ferrari, going in opposite directions, passed each other.

“Wasn’t that your father’s nurse?” Lauren asked.

“I didn’t notice,” Jason said.

“For heaven’s sake,
slow down
,”
said Lauren. “We’re not going to a fire.”
Men,
she thought. What was there about babies that flipped them out? Did they think of them as creatures from another planet or what? What if she’d told Jason she was pregnant with
twins?
She thought of those times when she and her girlfriends had made convoys with their doll carriages, always having to watch the bushes for hostile boys. Could it have been that they’d wanted the dolls for themselves? What did it mean when they’d grab your doll away from you and hold it up in the air, like a trophy? Was the meaning connected somehow, with Jason having to fly over to his parents like this to report the news? Lauren felt vaguely like a field on which her husband had scored some sort of athletic triumph. Oh, of course she was happy, of course she was proud. She was absolutely thrilled. This was
their
child. She would put this childish want for something—well,
her own
—out of her mind, and tell Jason to take it easy, for God’s sake.

The Cases’ formal gardens ended right at the water’s edge. Roses hung over the high stone seawall, and their perfume mixed with the salt air.

As the wheelchair rolled forward, Jack stared straight ahead, at the ocean, at its vast, flat surface, beneath which there lay peace. When his wheelchair tipped over the wall, Jack’s arms, the good one and the bad, flailed for an instant like rags tied to a kite.

Jason screeched to a halt by his parents’ front door. Rushing into the house, he called out their names. He ran from room to room, but he didn’t find anyone.

He ran back outside, to Lauren, who was waiting by the car.

“They don’t seem to be around,” Jason said.

“Isn’t this your mother’s tennis day?” Lauren asked.

“Oh, yeah, of course, you’re right,” Jason said. “Come on, let’s go over to the court. My father’s probably there too, watching.”

The tennis court was empty.

But Jason saw that the guest house was open.

“They’re probably all in there,” he said, “having a drink.”

He ran up to the screen door, and was yelling, “Hey, Ma, guess what!” as he burst into the room.

51

So what if she couldn’t really act? And what difference did it make that she couldn’t cook, and was lousy at playing Scrabble, and left her clothes strewn all over the place (David actually liked that about her; the bra on the chair, the stockings on top of the bureau—it was like finding clues to her body, a little private game unto itself)? None of Rebecca’s flaws made her any less beautiful in David’s eyes. He was captivated by her, absolutely enthralled.

Even David’s work was a joy now. He had never understood before what it meant to be in love. When he was a child his mother had often said to him, “Oh, you don’t know what you want.” Now David knew that she’d been right. It was not wanting anyone enough that had frustrated him so. In his heart of hearts he’d always been alone, and so he’d lived with a sense of overriding hopelessness, going prematurely gray in his outlook. But now David’s gloom had given way to this constant, tremulous joy that sped him through every day, to the rapture of the night.

Able for the first time in his life to feel at ease with himself, David became a better agent. He worked harder because he was working
for
something, for someone. Free of his own frustration, he was able to concentrate on the frustrations of his clients. He came to know them better, to understand what made each of them tick, to see which qualities in them might make that vital connection between the actor and the role. One by one David’s clients began to get steady work—and recognition for it—and so David got more and more clients. He finally had to hire an assistant.

And it was all because of Rebecca.

A year to the day after they’d met, David surprised her with a new house in Bel Air. It wasn’t the biggest house in Bel Air, but it was one
terrific
house, a three-bedroom ranch with a kidney-shaped pool, landscaped so that there wasn’t one leaf out of place.

David carried her over the threshold, struggling to keep from trembling, because feeling the outline of her body drove him wild.

Later, while Rebecca slept, David went outside and sat in his bathrobe by the pool. The ripe fruit on the boxed lemon trees glowed in the moonlight. The pool, illuminated by an underwater spotlight, shimmered, a jewel in the turquoise necklace that hung around these brown hills.

David was perfectly content. He was a changed man, truly.

Yet his mother, back in New York, worried about him. He called her once a week the way he’d always done—but he never
shouted
anymore. His mother was beginning to wonder if his lungs were healthy, or if it was something even worse.

52

It wouldn’t have been any kind of a career anyway. That was what Kathy told herself after she’d quit the job she’d held for six months. For a week Melanie had worked in the crafts shop with her, but she hadn’t made it through her second Monday. Her agent had managed to get her a temporary booking with Klein, Leoper, and Klinge, a trio that worked trade shows. Leoper had hepatitis, so Melanie had been offered the job of replacing her for six weeks.

“I just feel I have to get back up on the stage,” Melanie had said to Kathy, “any stage. I’m at a strange place in my life. The man I loved is gone. And when I ask myself what’s left, the answer is my few friends—like you, Kath—and
the theater.
Show business is hard, but it’s not unforgiving. It’s like a family you can always go back to. You can be alone, but still feel you belong to something….
”

“I understand, Mel,” Kathy had said. And she had, all too well. This job wasn’t something that could give you a sense of belonging, or an identity. Working in a crafts shop wasn’t being a craftsperson. For that matter, the craftspeople weren’t the sort you’d particularly want to number yourself among. There was the furniture maker who was a Christian Scientist and who “didn’t feel right” about the prices put on his pieces without a lot of soul searching. There were the women weavers whose rugs looked like sweaters and whose sweaters fit like rugs. There were the potters, with their spattered aprons and mugs of herbal tea. Kathy was simply not one of them, and didn’t feel like one of them, even though she went home at night smelling of hand-dipped candles and potpourri.

When Kathy found out that she was pregnant, there wasn’t any question in her mind about whether or not she would continue working. There was no way she was going to give over the care of her own infant to a stranger in order to sell the few liberals left in New York organic doodads.

Alison Lowenthal-Goodman was born a week after Kathy left the crafts shop. Kathy’s contractions had begun while she was watching Jimmy Carter address the nation in a cardigan sweater. The baby weighed seven pounds, three ounces at birth. When they brought her in to show her to her mother, Kathy knew that she had found her career at last.

Not one of the women’s magazines could make Kathy feel even a little guilty because she had found fulfillment enough in the role of a wife and mother. Her craft was to color the world that her tiny daughter would begin to grow in, her calling would be to make of her natural domesticity a fine art. After they brought the baby home, Kathy did everything she had once done—and so much more—with infinite care, and in every little thing she did she felt proud, happy, ennobled. The experience of motherhood wasn’t any less miraculous just because it was commonplace.

Laying Alison’s tiny things in a bureau drawer, testing her bathwater with her elbow until it was exactly the right temperature, putting her to sleep at night, watching her become with each new day more of a little human being, this was enough. It was more than enough. Even while shopping in the cramped Pioneer supermarket Kathy felt life’s plenty all around her.

Aaron was getting more and more concerned about money, though. He had been putting in long hours before Alison was born, as any young lawyer has to, Kathy knew. The senior partners who lived so well on the tireless efforts of their youthful associates kept track of everyone’s weekly accumulation of paper. When Aaron began to go into the office Sundays as well as Saturdays, Kathy would sometimes protest, but her husband’s standard reply was “What do you think’s going to pay for Alison’s college?”