The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore (58 page)

Little Emily sullenly passed the dishes, glasses, and silverware under hot water at the kitchen sink and handed them to me to put in the dishwashing machine. Leon and Vivian finished their cake and retired to the living room, where we heard their mirth continue.

“So you live with that big fat douchebag?” said little Emily. I had taken off my suit jacket and rolled up the sleeves of my shirt.

“We’ve been performing Shakespeare in the subways and doing magic shows.”

When we finished washing the dishes, Leon and little Emily’s mother had disappeared from the living room.

Little Emily plopped down on the couch, snatched up a remote control and turned on the TV in a single fluid motion, with the muscle-memory of a well-practiced hand.

“Where is your mother?” I said. Little Emily shrugged and rolled her eyes.

“
Ptf.
Dunno.”

I sat down next to her on the couch.

“What are you watching?” I said. I scooted a little closer to her.

“
Friends
,” she said.

We watched the program for a while. I had never really seen much “grown-up” TV before. Lydia would only let me watch educational programming on PBS, or cartoons sometimes. Leon only liked golden-age Hollywood movies, or else he liked to turn on the news
and yell at it. But this? Something new to me. People were doing things on the screen, and it didn’t make any sense to me. There seemed to be an electric current in the air in the universe where these people lived, a gathering of invisible voices that would laugh at them, sometimes at such mysterious points in time that it was very difficult to determine what these disembodied voices found so funny. It also seemed that the people who lived in this world were themselves unaware of these voices—or if they were, they had grown so used to them that they no longer found it strange. What would it be like to grow up in the world of prime-time sitcoms? To come of age under the watchful eyes of these audible but invisible gods that live in the fabric of the air, a chorus of judging voices sadistically laughing at you from infancy, at your every mistake, your every misfortune, your every shameful secret, your every foible and error of judgment? It would drive you insane!

Where were Leon and Mrs. Goyette?

Little Emily went into the kitchen and returned with a sack of Cheetos. And so we ate the Cheetos and watched
Friends
. After
Friends
, there were other TV shows much like it. Some of them were set in offices, and some of them were set in the homes of the characters, or in comfortable locations like bars, coffee shops, restaurants. The characters usually worked at interesting but decidedly white-collar places of employment, like radio stations and magazine offices, jobs that apparently involve a lot of standing around drinking coffee and playing petty practical jokes on unsuspecting coworkers. The characters in these TV shows, despite the derisive cackles of the maddening crowd that hangs in the luminiferous ether between them, do not have to worry. They might have sexual relationships with one another, they might fall in and out of love with each other, they might have conflicts with each other, power struggles, or squabbles over resources. They are free to love, to hate, to go to work, and do all the things that people do, except worry.
They are supernaturally free of true worry, because these characters know that at the end of the episode everything will reset itself, and the world will be as new. These people live in a candied reality, where all the conflicts of real life appear and disappear in joyful simulacra free of the possibility of permanent consequence. All of these TV shows were like a single, soothing lullaby voice, holding up a hilariously warped mirror to the middle class and whispering to them:
Do not worry. Do not worry. Do not worry.

At some point during our TV watching and Cheeto eating, little Emily slipped her hand into mine. So, as we waited for Leon and Mrs. Goyette to return from whatever rabbit hole they’d disappeared into, little Emily and I sat on the couch downstairs, watching grown-up TV and holding hands as we ate Cheetos. The big crinkly cellophane sack of Cheetos we situated between us. I held her left hand in my right hand, and with my left hand I periodically reached into the Cheetos bag to grab some of the flavorful orange sticks, and she did likewise with her right hand, such that in time both the fingers of her right and my left hand were covered with sticky orange Cheeto-dust, while my right hand and her left hand were wet with the sweat produced from the heat of our pressed-together palms. We watched the grown-up TV shows where the world laughs at the inconsequential lives of its characters, and I didn’t understand much of it, but I liked the Cheetos and I liked holding little Emily’s hand, I liked to hold her slender little heated hand in my long purple freakish hand. And, once, each of us with one hand hot and wet and the other orange and sticky, we turned our faces toward one another, and our orange and sticky lips met in a long, profound, salty kiss. We were young, we were Americans, it was the late twentieth century.

I
t would not be quite accurate, I don’t think, to say that funds were wrongfully pilfered from our production budget to pay for my nose surgery. We wrote it up as a production cost because that was, after a manner of interpretation, what it was: there was no way I would have dared grace the stage as Caliban without my new nose; it was the nose that completed the effect I wished to achieve.

When we left the Goyette household that evening—very late that evening, after Leon and Vivian, little Emily’s mother, had finally descended the stairs to join us again, both of them with damp hair, for they had apparently showered; and after Leon had collected his jacket from the living room and his tie from off the dining room floor; and after Leon and Vivian Goyette exchanged a parting embrace and she deposited on his cheek a more-than-friendly smack that left the impression of her lipsticked lips on his bearded face, which rose to definition as soon as enough of the pink had drained from Leon’s face that the pink lipstick could be discerned against the surrounding flesh; and after we bid good-bye to little Emily, who was in a sullen way, unsharing in her mother’s high spirits; and after we walked outside and hiked back up the hill to where we had parked Leon’s ex-wife’s car out of sight in
order to conceal our embarrassing poverty; and after I had interrogated Leon as to the particulars of what had happened when he and Vivian Goyette, little Emily’s large mother, had remained out of sight for well over two hours; and after I had interrogated in vain, for Leon uncharacteristically clammed up and wouldn’t offer a word in the way of detail, thus forcing me to guess the worst; and after we had climbed back into the car; and after Leon started up the engine and began to try to guide us back to the Cross County Parkway, which would carry us home—Leon smiled wryly at me, as I sat beside him, slipped his fingers into the breast pocket of his shirt, extracted a once-folded rectangular slip of paper and handed it to me, whereupon I inspected it, read the writing printed and scrawled upon it in the shifting light of the streetlights we were passing beneath, and saw that it was a check, in the account of Mr. and Mrs. Goyette, signed by Mrs. Goyette and made out for an impressively large sum of money. I was shocked by the figure written on the check.

“Is that correct?”

“Your eyes do not deceive you, Bruno. Of course I suppose this means that we must cast that sullen child in the role of Miranda. But if anyone can make anyone into a first-rate actress, it is I. How old is she?”

“She’s fifteen.”

“Aha! Convenient. That is the age of Miranda in the play.” Leon quoted: “ ‘Canst thou remember a time before we came unto this cell? I do not think thou canst, for then thou wast not out three years old, and twelve year since, thy father was the duke of Milan and a prince of power.’ ”

Leon let me fondle the check and read it over and over on the way home. This was to be our production budget. The next morning we went straightaway to the bank to cash the check before any second thoughts could come to a more sober Mrs. Goyette. The
first thing we bought with the money was a sturdy metal box with a combination roll that released its snaplocking clasps, in which we dumped all the crisp, never-been-circulated one-hundred-dollar bills that Leon and I had summoned from their beds of rest in the bank teller’s register, to introduce them into the winding paths of commerce, to be spent toward a good cause, and forthwith set out on whatever untold adventures the world had in store for them. We carefully counted and re-counted the money, and wrote the amount on the top line of the first page of a yellow spiral-bound college-ruled steno pad (much like the notepads that Gwen, my amanuensis, uses to record this narrative), clipped the pen to the pad and put it in the box to keep the cash company, along with a calculator for subtracting expenses. This was the entire extent of the bookkeeping system we cleverly designed for the company expense account of our now-considerably-enriched avant-garde theatre group, the Shakespeare Underground. Leon and I decided on a combination that we each committed to memory, set the combination, shut the box tight, and locked it.

Then we immediately opened it again to pay for lunch. We extracted two of the crisp hundred-dollar bills, fastidiously marked the expense on the steno pad, locked the box, stashed it under the futon, and took a train downtown for celebratory steaks. It took a while to find a nice restaurant that we hadn’t swindled before, but we found one, and over top sirloins and martinis we discussed the immediate future of the Shakespeare Underground. Our first argument concerned the venue. We arrived at no immediate conclusions, as Leon was hard-pressed to think of a theatrical venue that he had not been barred from for some reason or other. Our second argument concerned our first significant production expense, which was to be my nose surgery. Leon argued that it was an unnecessary and irresponsible use of company funds, the relevance of which to the project at hand was questionable at best.
Leon, it turned out, would later have to eat a lot of crow concerning his initial objections to my nose surgery, because the surgery in an unexpected way led to the resolution of the first argument. Then we entered the serious planning stages, i.e., preproduction. What we imagined was spectacular, veritably epic in scope and ambition. We had the first of many conversations about what was needed to resuscitate the theatre for the coming twenty-first century—for that was our ultimate aim. I’d been reading Stanislavsky, I’d been reading Artaud. This reading was all part of Leon’s required reading list for my tutelage in modern dramaturgy. As a teacher, Leon equally emphasized both theory and practice, and was particularly interested in the theories of Artaud.

“This shall probably be the greatest production of Shakespeare in history,” said Leon. He gingerly pushed his hair back from his face with his fingertips to prevent it from getting in the martini he was slurping. I had to agree.

“I have realized,” Leon continued, “that Shakespeare wrote at the tail end of the period in human history in which the magic of the narrative art was still truly alive. Later, the wild animal of Shakespeare was captured, killed, taxidermized, and enshrined by the idiotic and anodyne scholarship of the four sad centuries that have followed him, but this obviously is not the Bard’s fault. We must save Shakespeare from his admirers, from his murderers. We must save him by doing away with the tyranny of the text.”

I asked how this might be possible.

“An excellent question. The task that lies before us now is to undo the damage that the Enlightenment and its subsequent centuries have wrought upon the narrative arts. We must revive a sense of danger to the theatre, a sense of vitality. To break down not just the fourth wall, but also the first, the second, and the third. These walls should never have been built. Do you follow?”

“Not exactly.”

“Then I shall explain. After many exhaustive years of careful study and reflection on the matter, I have arrived at the inconvenient conclusion that the Enlightenment caused the beginning of the downfall of Western theatre, just as it ruined nearly everything else. You will notice, for instance, that the centuries following Shakespeare produced astonishingly little literature that may be deemed truly significant. The work of Edgar Rice Burroughs is an exception. And
some
Dickens. But they were swimming against the current.” Leon paused to insert a generous plug of steak into his cheeks. “Take the Ancients,” he went on, gesturing with his fork, his words pillowed in his cheeks by his chewing. “For them, theatre could not be disentangled from the very fabric of life. The Romans took the theatre so seriously that they were known to occasionally execute people onstage, and would write these executions into their plays, as sort of, you know, plot points.”

“One might argue,” I felt it necessary to point out, “that we should not admire the seriousness with which the Romans took the theatrical arts, but rather be appalled at how seriously they didn’t take the dignity of human life.”

“Bah! What a deeply uninteresting perspective. Please henceforth banish it from your mouth in my presence.”

“Sorry.”

“Right. Where was I? I would speculate that Western theatre began its steady crumbling decline around the fall of the Roman Empire, and was nearly complete by the mid-seventeenth century. After that, it would never be as good again. Why, you may ask? Because after that historical moment, the narrative arts had become severed from the body of society—severed like a limb is severed! After that, all narrative art was placed inside a display case, as something to be viewed safely from outside. It became like a caged animal, pacing back and forth before the bars, to be awed and admired only from behind a protective barrier.”