The Hamlet Trap (4 page)

SIX

Her real name, Sunshine
said, was Elinor Shumaker, but she had changed it in the sixties, seventies, sometime. She was a shapeless woman of thirty-five in a long plaid skirt with a petticoat showing, hiking boots, a padded jacket over a sweater over a man's plaid shirt. Her eyes were gentle and vague, pale blue, her hair vaguely blond. She carried a large quilted shopping bag with rope handles; it bulged and clunked when she put it down, rattled and clinked when she picked it up.

Laura glanced at Gray. What were they supposed to do with her? Sunshine had called from the bus station half an hour ago; she had arrived, she said, and hung up.

“Do you want some coffee or something?” Gray asked, taking the shopping bag from her.

“I don't drink coffee,” she said softly. “Caffeine's really bad for you, you know?”

“Uh, yeah, I guess so. Look, Sunshine, do you have any place to go? Why are you here? I told you we'd mail the check.”

She smiled gently. “I thought it'd be neat to watch a play going into production, might even try out for a part or something, you know? I'll find a room or something. And you said we have to rewrite it and I thought I should be here for that, you know?”

“We'd better call Ro, or Ginnie,” Laura said, her voice grim. “We're strangers here, too,” she said to the woman. “We don't have a clue about where to tell you to look for a place to stay.”

“I'll get by,” Sunshine said, not moving.

“I'll give Ro a call,” Gray said in desperation. He left Laura with Sunshine and made the call; in a few minutes Juanita appeared.

“So you're Sunshine,” she said without surprise. “Well, come along. There's an apartment building where they take in actors all the time, by the week, month, year, whatever you want. How much can you afford to pay?”

Sunshine smiled at her. “Hundred a month, I guess. More if I have to. But no smokers or drinkers.” She turned back to Gray and Laura. “Will we be working in your office or something? I don't have a typewriter, you know?”

“We'll work something out,” he said. Sunshine left with Juanita, still smiling, her bag clinking and rattling.

Silently Laura and Gray returned to her car. She got behind the wheel. When they were both settled she said, “She is not to set one foot in our house! You know?”

“Christ,” he muttered. “Holy Christ! She's stoned out of her skull.”

Laura started to drive. Tightly she asked, “Gray, what exactly am I supposed to do here? You're busy and you'll be busier, but what is there for me to do?” There were no jobs in Ashland, she had learned already.

“Can't you just relax for a few months?”

“Doing what? There's nothing here! Don't you understand? I'm in someone else's house with nothing to do and no one to talk to and nowhere to go.”

“We've been here less than a week, for Christ sake! What do you expect?” He said, more quietly, “Look, Ginnie's having Ro, the two of us, and her friend from the university for dinner tomorrow night. Peter can introduce you to a whole new set of people, not theater people.”

That was the problem, she admitted to herself. When they first met, he had moved into her circle of friends effortlessly. Over the year she had dropped most of them, but it had been gradual, and there were a few she had kept to the end in Connecticut. He had not moved into the university theater group the way he was doing here. He had known that was a stopgap, temporary, and he had not cared to make the effort then. And she had been busy. There had never been quite enough time there, but when she gazed into the future here, the next months anyway, all she could see was herself alone in a stranger's lovely house where there was nothing for her to do.

She jerked the car when she shifted gears climbing their steep hill. “Goddamn it!” She glanced at Gray; he was looking out his window and seemed very distant, too far to reach.

“Ignore the mess,” Ginnie called out when they arrived at her house the next night. “Just step over anything, or kick it out of the way.”

She had yelled for them to come on in, and now as they stood in the foyer, she appeared, wiping her hands on a towel. “I sent Peter out for some whipping cream, and Uncle Ro's late. He's always late for dinner at my house. He hates the preliminaries, all that cheese and stuff. Hang up your things in the closet behind you. My hands are sticky.” She backed her way into the living room, leading them. “Come on out to the kitchen, okay? I'm up to my elbows in pie crust.”

The house was all up and down. Stairs led up to the kitchen, which was large with many cabinets, a handsome oak table with six chairs. Other stairs led to other areas. It seemed too big a house for a single person. On the table in the kitchen there was a blue ceramic platter with Brie and wheat crackers, grapes, and prosciutto, paper thin, rolled and held with toothpicks. White wine was in a cooler, red wine in a decanter.

“Please help yourselves,” Ginnie said, waving to the table. “I have to get this goddamn crust in one piece in the pie pan… .” She worked at the counter, muttering under her breath. After a moment, she drew back and surveyed her effort. “To hell with it,” she said. “That's why I decided to send Peter for whipping cream. It can hide a multitude of sins.”

Ro and Peter arrived almost together and she moved the platter and wine to the living room. Dinner was late.

When it was finally ready, Ginnie brought a casserole to the table and said in awe, “My God, look at it! It's gorgeous!”

It was salmon with shrimp and crab stuffing, and it was beautiful.

“Haven't you made it before?” Laura asked.

“Nope. I always try things out on company. Oh, salad.” She jumped up to get the salad from the refrigerator.

“I'm too chicken to experiment like that,” Laura said. “What happens is that I try everything out the week of the dinner party, and by the time we have it a second time, I'm bored with it.”

“I guess I figure why should I suffer alone if something doesn't work.” She looked at her uncle. “William said that Sunshine was in the costumes today. Anna will take her head off for her.”

Ro looked unhappy. “I know. We straightened that out. She was just trying on stuff, she said, smiling like an angel. I marched her around the theater, showing her what's off limits, where she's allowed to go. She wanted to go below and see the trapdoor mechanism. Her words.”

Gray shrugged helplessly. “Darned if I know what to do with her.”

Ro said, very quietly, “Me too.”

And that, Ginnie thought, was known as allowing enough rope.

“We'll work on the play this week, maybe into next week,” Gray said. “And then I'll tell her to go back home until late January.”

“What trapdoor?” Peter asked suddenly.

“A lot of theaters used to have a single trapdoor on stage,” Ginnie said. “They called it the Macbeth Trap, for Banquo's ghost to make his appearance and disappearance.”

Ro snorted. “Where'd you hear that? It's the Hamlet Trap. That's where they bury Ophelia.”

Ginnie flushed. “I don't believe you. It's the Macbeth Trap. Everything I've ever read about it says that.”

“Well, honey, I think you read the wrong things.” Ro's voice was easy, he was relaxed, enjoying the evening, the home-cooked meal. Neither he nor anyone else was prepared for the flash of anger that made Ginnie's voice shake when she abruptly left the table.

“Would it ever occur to you that maybe you could be wrong? Why is it always the other person?”

Gray reached for the wine and poured more for himself and for Peter, who was watching Ginnie with a frown. “I've seen it both ways,” Gray said. “What I told Sunshine was that there's been a plague of spiders below stage and we had to call in exterminators who used some kind of spray on them. She doesn't go places that have been sprayed.”

Ginnie came back with small plates for pie and started to clear the table. “Now you see the magic of whipped cream,” she said, but her voice was strained.

As soon as they were all finished, Peter said, “Maybe you'd like to see the house? Would you mind, Ginnie? It's such a great house,” he added to Laura. “And her models are terrific.”

“Let me,” Ro said, and took Gray and Laura off for a tour.

Peter held Ginnie in his arms. “What happened? Are you all right?”

She nodded. “It's… I don't know what came over me. It's okay now. Sorry.”

Together they filled the dishwasher and prepared the coffee tray. Then the others returned to the kitchen, talking about the models of stage sets that Ginnie had done.

“They're wonderful, just wonderful,” Laura said. “What a shame they aren't on permanent display somewhere.”

Ro nodded emphatically. “In the lobby. I keep saying we should set up a showcase in the lobby.”

Ginnie laughed and shook her head. “Come on. Let's have coffee.”

“Gray, how do you feel about musicals, operettas, even opera?” Ro asked suddenly.

Ginnie stopped and looked at Gray, waiting. He nodded, puzzled by the question.

“You see, Ginnie and I tried to talk Kirby into something last year that he really balked at. Never saw him come on so stubborn, but there it was. We had to give it up. What we wanted was
The Threepenny Opera
. Kirby turned it down flat, and if the director says no, you'd better back off or you'll have a mess on your hands.”

Gray's eyes had narrowed. “It's a major production. Do you have the singers, the musicians?”

“Some of the best.”

Ginnie began to sing in a husky voice: “ ‘And the shark he has his teeth and/There they are for all to see./ And Macheath he has his knife but/ No one knows where it may be—'”

She broke off and laughed. “It has wonderful music!”

She could tell by Gray's attitude that he was hearing the Kurt Weill music in his head. She put the cream on the tray and Peter picked it up to take to the living room. That was when the party ended, Laura later thought, when Gray nodded, and then again, with enthusiasm, and the three of them, Ro, Ginnie, and Gray, forgot Laura and Peter for the next two hours.

They were talking animatedly about the pros and cons of updating it rather than making it a period piece when Peter motioned to Laura and asked, “Did you see Romeo and Juliet in the workroom?”

Laura was certain that none of the others even noticed when she and Peter left.

“Do you know
The Threepenny Opera
?” Peter asked in the workroom.

She shook her head. “I know the song Ginnie sang, or at least it was familiar when she sang it. I couldn't have come up with it by myself.”

“Me too. Here's Romeo.” He took a tiny doll from a shelf and placed it in one of the sets. It was in scale. “And there's Juliet, hiding as usual.” He put her in a different set. Each model set was about fifteen inches high, about that deep, and a little wider. Laura thought one set was for
A Doll's House
; she didn't know the other one. They were not labeled.

“Two different worlds,” she said faintly. “They'll never get together that way, will they?”

He moved Romeo to Juliet's world. “How strange to think of all those worlds existing side by side, each one playing out its little drama, none of the people even aware of the other worlds, other people.”

Shelves filled one whole wall; the sets were side by side from floor to ceiling, pigeonhole worlds, each cut off from the others, invisible to the others. Laura shivered and drew her sweater closer about her. Romeo and Juliet were together for the present, but she knew what the future held for them.

“It must be fun to make worlds, play with dolls, and call it work,” she said.

He nodded. “Speaking of work, Ginnie says you're looking for a job. There's a man at the university, Dr. Lockell, who's looking for a research assistant for a book he's doing. It's his life's work and he's been at it for years and God knows if he'll ever finish it, but he does want an assistant.”

“In what field? I've never done anything just like that.”

“Paleontology. But it doesn't matter if you know the subject. Believe me, he knows it. He's out to prove his theory in the face of opposition from the establishment that Indians were in the area thirty thousand years ago. The conventional wisdom is that they came twelve thousand years ago, no earlier. He's been amassing data for forty years. Now he's looking for someone to help sort it, to type his notes, organize his findings. He really doesn't want an expert, just someone able to do organizational work. Would you be interested in talking to him about it?”

She nodded. “You got our house, and now you're finding a job for me. How can I thank you?”

With a wry grin he moved Romeo once more, away from Juliet, out of her world. He looked at the two dolls and said, “Maybe, if they can't get together all that much, they need someone else to talk to, someone who understands about all those separate worlds.”

Laura wanted to weep, for both of them.

SEVEN

Ginnie slumped in a
chair in her living room. “It's the damn budget meetings that get me,” she groaned. “Gray made Eric fly off the handle by suggesting maybe he wouldn't be able to keep up with all the stage managing, prompting, helping with the directing, and Eric yelled that he could do it, but not with Gray standing over his shoulder all the time. Uncle Ro had to get between them, and then he stirred it all up again by saying he still thinks Sunshine's play should be abandoned, and Sunshine put down a well or something. She's driving everyone crazy.” She sighed and accepted the glass Peter held out. It was a rather strong gin and tonic. She drank gratefully.

Peter nodded. Laura had told him that Gray's rewrite of Sunshine's play was driving him, her, and Sunshine all mad. No matter what he did, Sunshine undid it. Her current version would run three hours. Gray had said it would work, and he'd make it work if it killed him. He was up most of the night, night after night with it. As far as she could see, it got no better, just longer.

“Ginnie, is it always like this at this time of the year?” Peter asked.

She shook her head. “Part of it is. This is when they do all the repairs on the theater, painting, cleaning the carpets, plumbing, all that work that gets put off during the season. But the rest of it… It's because we have a new director, that makes people nervous; and that woman.” She shook her head, drank again. “That helps. Now, let me tell you our program for the year.”

He put his finger on her lips. “No more show biz for tonight. Finish your drink, wash your face, and change your clothes. Remember the dinner my department's giving me? It's tonight, one hour from now.”

She jumped up. “Oh, damn! I forgot!”

“I know. But I remembered and there's plenty of time.”

She looked stricken. “How can you stand it? Why do you put up with me?”

“Because I love you. Now scoot.”

There were twelve people at the dinner in Margo's Restaurant, and although Ginnie had met most of them at one time or another, he was certain she did not remember. She charmed them all anew.

“When I was in grade school,” she said late in the evening, “I took my collection of rocks for show-and-tell. Remember show-and-tell? It's how they torture children and get away with it. We had to participate. Anyway, I got up and showed my sorry bunch of junk and talked about the Indian heads I had found and they all laughed. I fought at recess with a boy who was built like an ape over it, won, too. It was years later that I realized they were arrowheads.”

She told theater stories only when asked. “… so she finished her aria and jumped over the balcony,” she said. “The stagehands were there with a trampoline-like thing, a fireman's net or something. Well, she hit it wrong, and up came her feet, then a second time, and even a third time. The audience pretended not to notice.”

Finally it was over and Peter and Ginnie walked to his car. He put his arm around her shoulders. “You were swell,' he said.

“What do you mean?” she asked carefully.

“Ah, Ginnie, I've known you for eight months now, in all kinds of moods. Tonight you were an Oscar candidate. Thanks.”

“I'm sorry,” she said in a low voice. “They're nice people.”

“Shh. No more. Let's go home.”

Their lovemaking was almost desperate that night. Ginnie was almost desperate, he thought later, when she was asleep. She knew it was ending, he thought, just as he did. And there wasn't a damn thing either of them could do about it. He had seen Ro in the restaurant when they entered and had pretended not to; Ginnie had not seen him. He had hated the man with an intensity that was alarming at that moment. Ro would win, Peter realized, and not have to lift a finger, say a word. There was nothing he, Peter, could offer her that could compete with what Ro could give her. He thought of her model sets, of Romeo and Juliet in separate worlds. It was a long time before he could sleep.

Ginnie prowled the theater. Outside Gray's office door she paused momentarily. He was shouting, “Damn it, Sunshine, what would a real live man say when he brought home a strange woman? Not, This is my angel of destruction.' My God, not that!” Ginnie moved on.

William was directing a crew changing a cable from the overhead grid. She watched for a second, moved on. Bobby was in the light box, playing with his new system. She watched the light sweep across the stage floor, moved on. Anna yelled at a deliveryman not to put it there, goddamn it! Eric and Brenda were arguing about something near the call-board; Brenda stormed away, Eric turned and yelled at a painter. Ginnie left the backstage area, made her way through the dim auditorium, using a penlight now and then in places where the stage lights did not reach, and finally sat down in the last row center. She carried her sketchbooks and pencils in her bag. She stared blankly at the stage, ignoring the men working on it, ignoring the lights that changed with incredible speed. Bobby was having a private light show. After a while she brought out a sketchbook, and her hand flew as she did one sketch after another, hardly even looking at what she was doing, only occasionally shining her light on the pages. After a time she got up and moved to the left of the auditorium, sat down and began to sketch again. She moved several more times, barely aware of when she did so, paying little attention to where she was sitting, never staying long in one place.

She was startled suddenly by Sunshine's voice directly behind her. “Is that how you do it, in the dark? I should have guessed. Your aura's blue, you know?”

Ginnie snapped the book shut. “What are you doing back here, Sunshine? I thought Uncle Ro told you to stay backstage.”

“No, that never came up. I can't go in the light box, or below stage, or in any of the offices. He didn't say I can't come sit out here. How can you see what you're doing?”

“I can't.” She stuffed the sketchbook and pencil back in the bag and started to get up.

“You want me to read your cards? I read tarot, you know?”

“No, thank you. I have to go now.”

“I read them already, you know? I do that, read them first just to make sure there's nothing terrible coming up. If there is, I don't like to talk about it. Yours isn't so terrible. But you have black spots, you know?”

“I don't know what you're talking about. I have to go.” She fled.

She found Gray in his office. He looked as tired as she felt. The manuscript was on his desk. Kirby had stripped the room of all but the basic furniture: the desk, two chairs, a filing cabinet. Gray had added nothing of his own. It looked barren and uninhabited.

“I have to talk to you,” she said at the door, and waited for his nod. She entered, closed the door behind her, and crossed the room to stand before the desk.

“You've got to get that woman out of the theater. She has to go.”

“Sunshine? What's she done now?”

“Never mind specifics. You know how it's been with her. She's… she has to be out before auditions start.”

He stood up. “I wasn't aware that I was to take orders from you. Is this a new thing, or are you presuming a bit too much?”

“Damn it, Gray! You know how disruptive she is! She's driving people bananas! And for what? Why should anyone have to put up with her?”

He snatched up the play. “This is why. Listen.” He read the first page, then the next. He was a very good reader, better than many actors she had heard reading. He slammed the manuscript down again and glared at her. “Say it! It's good and you know it!”

She nodded. “It's good. I'm surprised, but it's good. Your work or hers?”

“Hers! I have to force her to read each line, say each line and then tell me what she wants them to say, and then get that on paper, but it's hers. And it's damn good.”

“I don't care! If she were writing a masterpiece, if she were writing Faustus I wouldn't care! It isn't worth it to the rest of us!”

“If you can't control your own temperament, maybe it's your problem, not hers!”

The door opened and William stuck his head in. “Private fight, or can anyone get in on it?” Directly behind him was Ro. He gave William a push and they both entered. The office was very crowded suddenly.

“Ah, you know, on this side of the building, the walls are pretty thin,” William said apologetically.

“That woman's out there hanging on every word,” Ro said in an icy tone.

“Well, let her hear!” Ginnie yelled. “Let everyone hear! What do you think it's going to be like around this place when she starts doing tarot readings for the cast? Can you imagine it? ‘I see a catastrophe, a terrible accident. Avoid dark men.' Bullshit!”

She suddenly passed William and Ro and yanked the door open and screamed, “Get the fuck away from this door! Get out of here and let us have some privacy!”

“I wouldn't say anything like that,” Sunshine said, smiling gently. “I told you I don't say when things look bad.” She smiled at the men vaguely and turned, wandered slowly down the narrow hallway toward the costume room. Her shopping bag clinked and clanged as she moved.

“She minds you,” William said doubtfully to Ro. “Order her not to read the cards.”

“Then she'd turn up with chicken entrails or a crystal ball or something,” Ginnie snapped. “You can't think of all the things you'd have to order her not to do. It's don't-put-beans-up-your-nose time with her.”

“Simmer down, honey,” Ro said then. “How long do you need with her?” he asked Gray.

“Another week at least. She's doing good work right now. It's just that she has to wander about and think from time to time. Maybe I can keep her confined to the office when she's here.”

“Maybe you can make time move backward,” Ginnie muttered.

“Maybe you've got some kind of personal problem you're taking out on her,” he shot back at her.

“And after you're through writing her play for her, what then? You know damn well she's not going away until it's staged and she plays prima donna at opening night. If you order her to stay out of the theater, she'll hang out at the door smiling at everyone who comes in. My God, she's an albatross!” She pulled the door open. “I'm edgy, and bitchy, and tense, and mean as hell, buster, and it's not because I have a problem. It's because I have work to do and want to do it and this is how I get. I don't need you, or your discovery, to add to any of those things. I'm going home and I won't be back until she's gone. Call me when it's over.” She slammed the door behind her.

Gray sank back into his chair and expelled a long breath.

Ro went to the door. His face was composed, his voice flat as he said, “This is your problem, Gray. Solve it before tonight.” He left.

“We'd better have a little talk,” William said. He pulled a chair around to face the desk and sat down. “There are a couple of things that I don't think you understand yet. One is that Ro won't put up with a lot of hassle where Ginnie's concerned. And less where the theater's concerned. That's just how it is with him. Now what are we going to do about Sunshine?”

Gray shrugged helplessly. “God, I don't know. Laura won't let me take her to the house. We can't work in that room she's renting. I tried and it's hopeless.”

“There are several possibilities,” William said slowly. “One's here, and that's out. Believe me, Gray, that's really out. Ro knows how Ginnie works. She prowls backstage, out in the auditorium, in the light box, out in the shop, and then she settles somewhere drawing like a maniac. And up again. She walks miles in this stage, and she lied when she said she gets mean. Usually she won't even see you or say a word to anyone. And we've all learned to leave her alone. She's too good to upset, you see, and Ro knows that. He won't let you, or Sunshine, or anyone else upset her. It's not even a choice between her and Sunshine. No choice to it. And I'm afraid that there wouldn't be a choice between you and her, either. Just how it is.”

Gray nodded, knowing it also. That meant his house, he realized, and he knew Laura would have to accept it. She had no choice either.

William went on. “And when Ro said by tonight, that's what he meant. He'll want to know exactly how it's been settled, and he'll want to know by tonight. So, it's her room, or your house, or rent an office, or something.” He stood up. “I'll talk to my wife about her. Maybe she can stay out at my house during the day until the show opens. Shannon's sick, she might even like having someone in to read the cards, make herb teas, just coddle her generally. I'll see about that.”

Gray rose, too. He held out his hand and William shook it. “Thanks. I'll tell Ro I'm getting her out of here, at least until rehearsals.”

When Gray told Laura, she stared at him, her eyes wide and frightened. “Don't you see what's happening?” she whispered. “We're acting out her play.”

She remembered what he had said about entering another reality, living it, making others accept it. But not me, she wanted to cry out.

“I don't have a choice,” Gray said tiredly. “It won't be for long, a week at the most.”

Silently she went to the kitchen to start dinner. The next afternoon when Gray returned from the theater to work with Sunshine, he found her reading the cards for Laura.

“What are you doing here? I told you to come at two.”

“I didn't want to make you wait for me, so I came early,” Sunshine said, smiling her gentle, soft smile.

He looked at Laura. Very brightly she said, “Well, I'm off to the university. I'll work until five or a little after. See you later.”

Too bright, too cheerful, he knew, and felt helpless to do anything about it.

It was cold outside, a week before Christmas, and Laura drove instead of walking as she usually did. That had been as silly as she had known it would be, she told herself. Sunshine was mildly crazy, not dangerous certainly, but not quite normal. Auras and tarot cards and prophetic dreams! Silly woman. Still, the words played around and around in her head like a tape loop.