Stages (6 page)

Shrugging, Melanie said, “Well, when you’re handed a line like that one.”

Mike couldn’t help but smile at her.

“By the way,” he said, “who was that Swedish-looking kid who signed up to work on lighting?” Except for a weak chin, the kid was sort of attractive, and Mike has seen Mr. Cherry sizing him up.

“I have absolutely no idea,” Melanie said. “Listen, I’m still in a daze from this afternoon.”

The
Lear
cast list had been posted at 2:00 P.M.
It was now five-thirty, and Melanie, Mike, and David were sitting in a bar waiting for Paula and Kathy.

“It is kind of hard to swallow,” David agreed. “Lauren playing Cordelia. Jesus. With that
Bacall
voice of hers. And her
height.
Christ, he’ll have to fold her up to carry her on stage.”

“You know I kind of hoped he’d cast Kathy as Cordelia,” Mike said.

“So did I,” Melanie replied. “But it takes more than talent, ya know. On top of talent you gotta have luck, and chutzpah. Or you have to put out. Maybe you need things we don’t even know about yet. Maybe you have to do things we can’t even imagine.”

“I’m getting depressed,” David said. He began to finger a saltshaker contemplatively.

“Oh, come on, David,” Melanie admonished him. “We’re not in the mood for moods. Why don’t you just put something on the jukebox. I’d like to hear the Stones. ‘Satisfaction’ or something.”

“If we have to have anything on at all, I’d rather listen to Simon and Garfunkel,” David replied. “They express New York urban malaise better than anybody else.”

“Except you,” Melanie said.

“How can you talk about urban malaise?” David replied. “You’re from Marion, Massachusetts.”

“Oh, urban malaise, my foot,” Melanie said. “What Simon and Garfunkel have got is the blues. ’Course they probably got ’em wholesale.”

Mike slipped a quarter in the jukebox and pressed the buttons. Just then Kathy and Paula walked in.

“There’s the postmortem over there,” Paula said.

Mike grabbed a chair from a nearby table.

“This is nice timing,” Melanie said as Kathy and Paula sat down. “We were just about to order another pitcher.”

“Who picked out that song?” Kathy said appreciatively.

“We’ll Sing in the Sunshine” was playing on the jukebox.

“Me,” Mike told her.

Kathy gave him a warm smile. She always appreciated musical sensitivity. In fact she appreciated any kind of sensitivity; she seemed to regard it as a politeness to life in a rude world. It was the shared opinion of Melanie and Paula that Kathy’s own sensitivity was both her triumph and her undoing. Her acting was heartfelt, but so were all her disappointments. Melanie was afraid that Kathy was destined to go through life with a pocketful of wooden nickels.

“So what do you think about Riddiford’s casting job?” David asked the two new arrivals.

“I think it’s wonderful that he cast Lauren as Cordelia,” Kathy said.

Melanie and Paula exchanged pained looks.

“I think he did it to make Goneril and Regan look stunted next to her,” Melanie said. “Like a couple of malignant dwarfs.”

“I’m not sure about that,” Kathy said. “But I don’t see why Cordelia shouldn’t be statuesque.”

“Mmm.
She Stoops to Conquer,
” Melanie said thoughtfully.

Kathy started in again about how right Lauren was for the part, and David interrupted her, probably out of habit, Melanie thought.

“Lauren acts like she’s seen and done everything,” he said. “But sometimes I wonder what exactly she
has
done.”

“She hasn’t
slept
with anyone here, at least not anybody I know about,” Paula volunteered, with a sidelong glance at Melanie.

“Who cares who anybody sleeps with?” Mike asked.

“Why, we all do,” Melanie replied. “What else is there worth knowing? That’s what four years at a place like this does. It takes away your intellectual curiosity and replaces it with sexual curiosity.”

Mike laughed. Then he said, “I guess you’re right. I used to think of Mr. Cherry as a sexual curiosity. Now after four years here I know that what he really is is a sort of sexual curio.”

“Whereas a sexual Cheerio is a sorority girl who puts out,” Paula added.

“See how well educated we’ve all become?” Melanie said.

The pitcher that David had signaled for was brought by the wife of the bar’s owner.

“I got this one,” Mike said as he pulled some worn dollar bills from his pocket.

“How many does that make for you guys?” Paula asked.

“This’ll be our fourth,” Mike replied.

“Oh, brother,” said Kathy.

“So? We felt like drinking,” David told her.

Kathy shrank from him a little, as though she knew that he was starting something.

“This is the last major production that any of us are going to be involved in here,” he continued.

Melanie began to tap her fingernails on the table.

“Well, it’s nice then that we’re doing Shakespeare,” Kathy offered.

“Is it?” David asked. The edge in his voice was now unmistakable.

Oh, no, not this rap again,
Paula thought.

“I mean, why aren’t we doing a happening or something else that’s contemporary, for Chrissake?” David was saying.

“Happening, shmappening,” Paula sniffed. “What are you, a flower child now?”

“What do you know?” David snapped back. “How do you know what’s going to be on Broadway six months from how?”

“Only the Shuberts know those things,” Paula said. “We…are but mortal actors.”

“Mortal…or doomed?” David said. He drained his beer mug.

“Isn’t that an interesting souvenir plate of the Acropolis that they have up on that wall?” Melanie said airily. “And look at that one, with the dancers. I didn’t know that Greeks wore kilts.”

Listening to David’s familiar prophecies of doom, Paula thought that she could almost hear a Greek chorus echoing his words, a sort of Mitch Miller group made up of everyone’s parents keening together.

How are you going to support yourself?

And
We can’t pay your bills for you.

And
Don’t you want SECURITY?

David was attacking them all furiously now.

“How many people are there in New York and L.A. right now trying to make it in show business?” he said. “Hundreds of thousands of them. All out there hustling. Peddling their asses.”

Mike’s eyes rolled up into his head.

“Why doesn’t somebody play ‘Get Offa My Cloud’?” Melanie asked.

“Yeah, and just how far do you think you’re going to get?” David shot at her.

“We never know until we try,” Melanie said primly.

“You better try getting some secretarial skills,” David replied hotly. “I mean, who do we think we’re kidding? This time next year we’ll all be working nine-to-five jobs—if we’re not waiting on tables.”

Her eyes lowered, Kathy wiped up some spattered beer with a paper napkin.

“If you’re trying to ruin our cocktail hour, you’re starting to make some real headway,” Paula said.

Then, abruptly, Kathy put in, “Hey, I don’t
want
to be depressed. This
is
our last show, and I’m all excited about working on it.”

“In the prop room?” David said cruelly. “That’s some farewell performance.”

“It doesn’t matter what you’re doing,” Kathy replied. “It’s the spirit you do it in that counts. There’s nothing like the theater. Nothing. I don’t care what I do in it so long as I can be in it.”

“There’s no business like show business,” Melanie chimed in.

On the jukebox, “Nineteenth Nervous Breakdown” was playing.

Kathy began to hum “There’s No Business Like Show Business” anyway. Paula joined her. Then Mike. Melanie started singing the lyrics.

“Come on. Come
on,
”
David whined.

Melanie replied with an Ethel Merman blare. Everyone but David was singing now, and with feeling.

Melanie stood up and thrust her arms out. Then Mike was on his feet. Paula and Kathy hopped up too.

Paula felt her heart singing. This was just like that moment in
Casablanca
when everyone sang the “Marseillaise” and drowned out the Germans.

Linking arms, the four of them belted out, “Yesterday they told you you would not go far! Now, on your doorway, they’ve hung a star!”

David’s resistance crumbled. He too jumped up, because he couldn’t help himself.

They formed a chorus line and started high kicking like the Rockettes.

Nobody could hear the Stones anymore.

And the owner’s wife was praying silently for her table and chairs.

9

In a corner office that overlooked a quadrangle hill of elm trees wrapped and trussed like old people sat James Riddiford. He was waiting for Lauren Holland, who had made an appointment to see him at three. They were now ten days into rehearsals, and James was growing more and more hysterical inside. The first time they’d run through the final scene and he’d had to pick up Lauren to carry her on stage, he’d almost gasped at the lightness of her—she wasn’t flesh and blood but gossamer that seemed to spin itself around his heart from the rigid skeins of his arms. He’d almost staggered. And he’d felt in her a tension that could have been a response.

Could have been.
Had to be.
Surely they both knew why she’d made this appointment. James had sensed that his wife already was aware something was happening. But she hadn’t confronted him with it, not yet anyway. This morning they’d argued over nothing, and she’d slammed the teakettle down on the stove, her voice cracking.

What difference did it make, then? Whatever there had once been between James and Ellen was put away upstairs now, somewhere in the back of a bureau drawer. Like James’s wedding ring. It was too tight for his finger, so he’d taken it off with soap one night and left it in a Swank jewelry case lined with spongy gray Styrofoam. The case also contained his high school ring, a pair of chrome-plated cufflinks, and a little plastic case with
This Tooth Is Mine
etched on it. In the case was a wisdom tooth with a twisted root that James had had extracted at the age of nineteen.

The jewelry case had been a Father’s Day present to James from his oldest son. Beside it in the dresser drawer was a picture of both of James’ sons taken nearly ten years ago, and one of his wife from the year they were married. He’d removed them from the top of the desk in his office because, he’d told himself, they were so old. He had to get more recent ones. He hadn’t, though.

Beethoven issued softly from the clock radio in one of James’s bookcases. Often the music occupied the greater part of his mind. Correcting the examinations and essays of his students was like doing crossword puzzles, except that instead of penciling letters into boxes he would fill in gaps in intelligence. A pile of term papers would sit there before him, stupefaction in every sentence they contained, and James would swivel around in his chair and gaze out on the quadrangle, where youth paraded shamelessly by hour after hour.

As James surveyed the quadrangle now, Lauren was hesitating outside the door of his office. She took a deep breath. She was nervous, but she was also sure of the way she felt. She’d had this feeling once before, at thirteen, the night her father, a little drunk, had escorted her to their car after one of her performances in a junior high production of
Arsenic and Old Lace.
She’d taken hold of one of his arms; he’d swayed a little, and she’d felt the heavy masculine presence of him against one of her small breasts. A tingling had started there, and it had made her blush so furiously that she’d had to turn her head. Her father hadn’t even noticed.

But Lauren had never forgotten the sensation of that moment. It was a feeling none of the male undergraduates at Blake could give her—those little boys with their sneakers and sweatshirts with numbers on the backs and dormitory rooms rancid with beer.

Lauren was almost at the end of her college career; she couldn’t leave the school yet, though. She couldn’t go forth into life carrying a need like this, having had this feeling stillborn time after time.

She knocked.

“Come in,” James said.

His office was lined with books. Against one of the bookcases was an old, shapeless sofa that had been slipcovered with a beige cotton fabric as serviceable and bland as a sheet.

“Hello, Lauren,” James said.

She was wearing a hooded, paint-splattered sweatshirt and tight blue jeans, the outfit she always wore when she was helping to build or strike a set. She had laundered her jeans only last night, and left them in the drier, at the hottest setting, for an hour.

Lauren saw that her teacher wasn’t wearing a tie. His jacket was hanging on the brass coat rack in the corner.

“What can I do for you?” James asked. He felt as if he were steering his words along a very narrow path. He could not look Lauren in the eye. Ruffling the uncorrected essay before him in his hands, he could feel himself slipping away from the settled routine that was his security and his torment. It could all go, and go so easily, like a dollar bill in the wind.