The Daredevils (15 page)

“And while your diligence in constructing a biography of Newman that would have pleased Stanislavsky in the early years of the Moscow Art Theater is remarkable and laudable, it would not have much impressed the Stanislavsky of today, now that the idea that it can all be worked out in advance of the actor appearing on the stage and moving about has been repudiated as being of little avail when the actor does in fact appear on the stage and
move about—repudiated as being an actual and frustratingly burdensome hindrance. The tone and volume of your voice, the manner of your accommodation of the other actors onstage with him, the nature and timing of your gestures and the effect the properties you handle has on you—this is as you have tirelessly and perhaps tiresomely noted is what matters, and is the means by which Christopher Newman might be located and animated. You are to spend no more time on thought, but quickly and quietly enter into what is to be done, whether you are James's Newman, Shakespeare's Romeo, or Strindberg's Arkenholz. If you insist in your panic on illustrating your speeches to make sure everyone understands, you will, I assure you, vanish from the stage. It is a magic trick, from which anti-magic will spring. You are a big, tough Christian.” Sir Edwin was now, inexplicably, speaking with a Russian accent. Charles supposed it was because they had been talking about Stanislavsky. “You are at home in world.”

“Do you mean me or Newman?”

Sir Edwin waved his hands in disgust. “I dun't care which one. You must be at home in world or we will bore audience to greatest disgust they can endure without throwing rotten vegetables at you. You must be, can only be, who you are. What does Polonius say to you, whoever you are, you ridiculous boy. ‘To thine own self be true. And it must follow as the night the day,
thou canst not then be false
.'” He had reverted to stage English for this quotation and waved off Charles's certain question as to why he was talking about
Hamlet
all of a sudden.

“I understand that,” Charles said, “but I can only play such a man as a cartoon.”

“You can only be self as if you are cartoon.”

“Yes.”

Sir Edwin produced a notebook and asked Charles to read out a marked passage.

“‘He was not given, as a general thing, to anticipating danger, or forecasting disaster, and he had no social tremors. He was not timid and he was not impudent. He felt too kindly toward himself to be the one, and too
good-naturedly toward the rest of the world to be the other. But his native shrewdness sometimes placed his ease of temper at its mercy; with every disposition to take things simply, it was obliged to perceive that some things were not so simple as others. He felt as one does in missing a step, in an ascent, where one expected to find it.'”

Sir Edwin clapped his hands and stood up from his favorite seat in the balcony. He suggested loudly that if Charles moved about the stage as if both timid and impudent, such behavior would be tiresome for an audience and finally unendurable. It would be his own fault because he could not or would not get over himself and simply be himself.

“You are actor,” said Sir Edwin. “Act.”

“I do not have this character within me. I would be perpetrating a ridiculous fraud upon our audience if I pretended I did. And whether or not they find my honesty tiresome, as you say, I do not care.”

“Stop whining and fretting and complenning and do what you must do.”

“I am not whining and fretting and—”

Sir Edwin shot an arm out from beneath his cloak and silenced Charles: If he was this certain kind of very particular fraud, why then not simply admit it? Why not accept himself for what he was and have the courage of his convictions? If he was a fraud then why could he not say so to the people who mattered, the ones who were paying good money to hear what he had to say? If he was a fraud he should stand there and defraud them all, not whimper to his fellow infants.

“I am not whimpering.”

“You are whimpering coward, Charles!”

“Do not call me a coward.”

“Why! Iz not truth?”

“Is not hull truth,” Charles mimicked faintly.

“You are coward. You say it many times yourself!”

“When I say that I mean something else entirely.”

Sir Edwin swirled his cloak around himself as if he were waltzing with it. He made a grand gesture suggesting tragedy, then asked Charles if he did
not know, could not tell, the difference between someone standing before him and earnestly trying to pass himself off as something he clearly was not, and an actor doing the very same thing.

“If you cannot, you are hupliss.”

Somewhere in the deep backstage, the carpenter who'd been battening a piece of twenty-four-gauge sheet iron to make a thunder sheet, dropped it; the ensuing crash of thunder caused the troupe—most of whom appeared to have been chatting but who were actually practicing the ancient
commedia
skill
of grammelot,
or nonsensical speech—to fall silent, just as they would have for the real thing.

“Very WELL!” shouted Charles. “I am HUPLISS!”

Because his Russian accent was funny, and because he had been experimenting with makeup techniques that were supposed to make him look twenty years older but which actually made him look like something halfway between a Minoan god-king and Rigoletto, a court jester with painted wrinkles and a square, curly beard pasted on his jaw, and finally because the conversations that had been interrupted had been intense but meaningless, his temper tantrum triggered a hilarity that was almost unnatural in its duration. But at its close he too was wiping tears of joy from his eyes. He felt he had learned something of great value. He was at least at home in this world, and it was possible that he “loved” it, loved everything about it, including the crazy, stinking Sir Edwin, making believe, and his own stage fright.

They would open in three hours.

He sat slumped and ill in a low broken chair in the green room. His knees rose up before him, so low and broken was this chair, and because they were so prominent, he tapped first one and then the other and then the first again with his diamond-studded walking stick. After a few minutes of this, he rearranged himself, the stick now between his legs, bearded chin and dove-gray gloved hands resting on the pearly knob. He appeared to be listening to something or someone, but no one in the cramped little room was speaking.
His knees had brushed his chin when he walked up the smoky staircase the night of the fire—why had he felt so calm then, and so sick now?

There were six others: Teddy Blair, whose demeanor was unassuming but whose voice was both explosively large and exquisitely controlled, got up to look like a portly older man, perched on one arm of my chair, smoking pensively a cigarette in a very long holder; two young women, Vera dressed to suggest a princess of the Second Empire, the other, the shockingly pretty Mary Girdle, a social-climbing bohemian trollop, both staring at, alternately, themselves and each other in a big but cracked mirror framed with electric light bulbs which gave them looks of stark madness; another young man, a dandy from the Philosophy Club, Eugene Woodcock, playing a charming ne'er-do-well, who appeared to be praying, his eyes closed tightly, his hands clasped, and his mouth trembling with the shapes of words; also from Berkeley and the P. Club, a much older man not associated with the university, Leonardo Garagiola, playing a very old man; and a plain, athletic middle-aged woman only recently arrived from Michigan, Margaret Stensrud, playing an ancient dowager, who, with Leonardo, was peering intently at her game of solitaire.

There were others but he had lost track of them. He had never known them and he did not want to know them now.

Suddenly the old man broke away and walked briskly to the doorway of an adjoining room—one of the spaces of the theater that had been burned and only hastily repaired—where the others had silently chosen to sequester themselves. He looked in at them and rubbed his hands together as if in eager glee. Small, distracted chuckles could be heard for a moment from within. Then Vera, very much the princess, Claire de Cintré, suddenly shouted, “No, no, no, you look just right! You look perfect, you really do! It's the stupid play that looks wrong! You look
alluring.
You look
wonderful
.” And the other threw herself into her friend's arms. They hugged and kissed and withheld makeup-smearing tears with desperate care.

Beyond the little rooms somewhere, the continuo group, augmented for opening night with a wind band, began to play “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Charles laid his cane across his lap and bent forward, pale and sweating
now, until his head was between his legs. They could hear the audience now too, singing along lustily. One of the plumber's surviving little sons stuck his head in the room and called out that the house lights were going to half. Charles dropped his cane with a clatter and vomited.

Little notice was taken. He himself was too exhausted to care. The Marquis de Bellegarde lifted his foot away from the splatter and said, “They start singing the national anthem and Chuckles throws up!” He stood and adjusted his false belly. “I'll get you a glass of water, bud.”

“Here's a rag!” whinnied the dowager in her stage voice. “Poor dear!” She hadn't looked up from her game, however.

“How very ironic,” the old man concluded, shooting his eyes comically left and right.

“Ironic?” murmured the dowager.

“That Chucky should vomit at the sound of the anthem when he's—”

“Mmm . . .? Oh yes. Yes, I see what you are—MY GOD I WISH THEY'D STOP THEIR CATERWAULING!” She wiped her eyes. “It's like a church service.”

Charles stood uncertainly, then drew himself up with a deep breath. To polite applause, he announced that he was all right and that he felt better, none of the diamonds had been dislodged from his incredibly expensive prop cane, everything, he was sure, was going to be okay. The dandy and the trollop left the room. The marquis said that it sounded as if half of San Francisco were out there.

“How many seats have we?” he asked.

The princess replied that he knew perfectly well how many.

Everyone was now on edge and eager to show it with any kind of clamped-down hysteria they could find.

The dowager swept the cards from her little table with a cry of outrage. “But I
don't,
dear!”

“One hundred and thirty-seven,” Charles said, accepting the glass of water.

The plumber's son poked his head around the door again and said they'd sold fifty standing-room-only tickets as well.

“
No
!” cried the very old man.

“Yes they
did
,” insisted the little boy.

Charles let the rag drop to my feet. The vomitus was actually little more than bile and saliva, and he toed the rag back and forth in it, soaking it up. When he stopped, he looked up to find everyone in the room watching him.

“
Where
,” inquired the marquis, “is one's valet when one has
need
of him?”

“Fuck you,” said Charles, without real conviction, rehearsing.

“Fuck me?” asked the marquis, equally wanly. He stood and adjusted his sash. “Fuck
you.
”

Charles stooped and quickly brought the smelly, dripping rag to the marquis's nose, who scrambled out of the way, bumping into the very old man, who in turn sat down in the lap of the dowager, who had picked up her cards and dealt herself a new game. They all laughed.

“I'll beat you all with my diamond-studded cane,” offered Charles.

“Oh yes, please!” they all moaned and jiggled.

“
Places
,” hissed the stage manager, who appeared out of nowhere. “What on
earth
is the
matter
with you people?”

“You have upset my game,” said the dowager coolly. “God
damn
you to hell.”

She and the princess crossed themselves, the princess suddenly pale and crazy-looking, her deep voice even deeper now with dread. “Here we go,” she said, as if from the tomb.

The dowager went to pieces again. “We are just not ready!” she shrieked. “I can't believe you're going to force us
out there
like this! To just . . .
throw us out there
! To the, to the . . . to the
dogs
!”

Charles sidled quietly over to the princess and told her that he was in love with her. He had clearly said it as Christopher Newman, but he had said it in a place where Christopher Newman did not exist. And saying so gave him an erection—he couldn't understand it: it was not something that would happen to Christopher Newman. Refusing to turn her face to Charles, Vera glanced at him with a kind of calm but insane expectancy.

“Do you love me?” he asked, not knowing what else to say, and having no time to think about it.

“No,” she said, swiveling her eyes back at him. “No, Charles, I do not. But I will suck your cock after our first scene.”

“You will?” he asked.

“Yes. I will.”

“All right.”

“Why
shouldn't
I?” she wailed in sudden terror. “Give me a thousand dollars and I'll do it.”

Theater was happening and nobody could stop it.

Charles felt suddenly defeated. “It won't work. Never mind. If you need some money I'll give you some.”

Sir Edwin stood in the doorway, rubbing his hands just as the very old man had done. Never before had he seemed so completely depraved a monk as he did then. Charles saw now only looks of panic and frank hatred on those faces that had beamed only the day before, the hour before, with childlike devotion and the most intimate trust in his mystic vision, and so was not surprised to see their Mad Englishman gone from the doorway when he looked back.

He walked from the green room to the nearest wing, still sipping his glass of water, and examined the scenery-flat flying ropes knotted to the pin rail. The knots, he believed, looked secure and well tied. He climbed up to the fly gallery: shipshape here as well. He was no longer ill, no longer afraid; he was in fact utterly oblivious to his surroundings. As if he were a casual bystander, he looked out onstage, at the “shabby sitting room on a small Parisian
quatrième
,” sparely suggested by odds and ends of furniture collected from the theater's patrons—from people, he marveled, like Durwood Keogh. He loathed Keogh, of course, but could not say why, not precisely, in that moment anyway, and was stricken with gratitude at the gifts of furniture. The curtain was still down, but he could feel the force, the weight of nearly two hundred expectant people just beyond it. He felt curious and intrigued: it trembled, whatever it was out there, a faint wave that rippled from one end of the curtain to the other, as if the breathing of the audience had taken on the properties of a breeze. The idea that they were
not individuals, but rather one great thing, was not new to him, or theater folk in general, but he felt it now—not in his guts, where it had just finished making him nauseous, but in his heart, where it made him not brave but fearless: he didn't care. He didn't think he cared, anyway, didn't feel that he cared. And wasn't that how daredevils felt? It was only
one thing
and he didn't care what
one thing
might think or say about him, or even directly to him. It knew nothing of him, after all, if it thought he was not part of its own “one-thingness” and its judgment would perforce be poorly constituted, superficial, beside the point if not altogether contemptibly mean-spirited. He was now a little angry, and when he realized it, was surprised at himself. He wanted to be calm again. Not caring was not an acceptable alternative. He wanted to be serene and helpful. But that was not how he had been trained to enter the scene.