Guy was flirting energetically with Eve and she was eating it up. I heard the golden phrase “my agent” more than once and some disparagement of the reviewers who had courteously withheld comment about Eve’s performance in our production. It was a rerun of the scene at Phebe’s a year ago, when Guy had made a play for Madeleine, but this time I was wishing him success. If he spent the night with Eve it would prove something I wanted proved, though I wasn’t sure exactly what that was. That Guy was a hypocrite? That he was heterosexual? Something along those lines.
But in spite of Eve’s best efforts, Guy wasn’t tempted. At length he turned to me and announced that he had to catch the last bus back to the city. “Walk over with me,” he said. “And we can finish our conversation.”
I followed him out into the street; my shoulders drooped, my feet shuffling like a reluctant child. The walk he proposed, which wasn’t half a mile, stretched out interminably. I felt I’d been sentenced to a term at hard labor. After a block of this he
looked back sharply. “Good grief,” he said. “Can’t you keep up?” I hustled along, allowing hostility to double for energy. Why did Guy always make me feel so tired and so shamed? I’d done nothing wrong. “So what do you want me to tell Madeleine?” he asked.
“I don’t want you to tell her anything.”
Again the close, deprecating look. “So I’ll tell her you have nothing to say to her.”
“Does she need money?”
“I should think so.”
“Tell her I’ll send her some money.”
“You could just give it to me.”
“No, I’ll mail it.”
“I’d rather you didn’t do that.”
“I don’t get why you’re in the middle of this,” I said. “Why should I care what you’d rather I did or didn’t do about Madeleine?”
“Because Madeleine doesn’t know I’m here.”
I stopped short. “So you lied?” I said.
“For a good cause.”
I pressed the heels of my hands into my temples. “Who do you think you are?” I exclaimed.
“Would you come on,” he said. “If I miss this bus I’ll have to sleep on your floor.”
This was a persuasive argument. I matched him stride for stride while he explained his mission. “I told her I would come talk to you, but she didn’t want me to. She said you’d only sent her one postcard and it was hardly even friendly. You really
hurt her with that. She figured you didn’t care what happened to her and knowing she was pregnant would only make everything worse. But I thought you had a right to know.”
“Did it occur to you that she doesn’t want me to know because I’m not the father?”
“She’s more than two months pregnant, Ed.”
“That doesn’t prove anything.”
He grasped his beard in both hands and, without missing a step, tore it loose from his chin. “This thing is driving me nuts,” he said.
“Does it itch?”
“Like fire ants,” he said. “It’s like having fire ants on your face.”
The bus station was a bench and a sign in front of a newsagent’s store and as we turned the last corner we could see a few people milling about in the bug-saturated light of the streetlamp. I wanted to close the conversation on a clear and final point. “The way I see it,” I said, “is that it’s up to Madeleine to decide who to tell and what to do. If she doesn’t want me to know, so be it.”
Guy stuffed the beard into his satchel. “The way I see it,” he said, “is that Madeleine is a girl in trouble and you can’t be bothered. Which is fine, Ed. I should have known. I should have known.”
I reached into my pocket and pulled out all the cash I had, about fifty dollars. “Look, this isn’t much, but give it to her. And I’ll send you a hundred more tomorrow. Just say you’re giving it to her; she doesn’t need to know it’s from me.”
He took the cash and held it for a moment, as if trying to
make up his mind whether to keep it or throw it in my face. We were close to the stop and we heard the huffing of the bus before it lumbered into view. The waiting passengers formed themselves into a civilized line. Guy and I stood motionless, both transfixed by the folded bills he gripped in his fist. As the bus came to a halt, the brakes whirred and groaned and the wings of the doors flapped open with a breathy whoosh. Guy crammed the money into the pocket of his jeans. “You make me sick,” he hissed, and he turned on his heel, leaving me on the curb.
I didn’t know if I’d been repudiated or skillfully scammed. I stood there, watching the passengers file into the bus, until I was certain Guy was on it. Then, in case he got back off, I decided to wait until the doors were closed. After that it seemed the best course to be sure the bus actually pulled away from the curb and rolled off into the night. When I couldn’t see it at all, I rubbed my eyes and looked again. Only then did a sensation of deep release and relief allow me to turn away and walk back to the boardinghouse where Eve, languidly rocking herself on the porch swing, waited for me.
T
he next day I wrote a check for one hundred dollars, leaving twelve dollars in my account, put the check in an envelope, and because I didn’t know Guy’s address, sent it to him care of his agent, Bev Arbuckle. I didn’t want to do it, but I didn’t not want to do it, either. Guy’s melodramatic description of Madeleine as “a girl in trouble,” which struck me as something from a ’50s soap opera, stung me—you can’t turn your back
on a girl in trouble. But Madeleine wasn’t some misguided teenager; she was an adult, perfectly capable of making her own decisions. Trusting Guy to give the money to Madeleine kept me from having to contact her directly. I honestly believed, I still do, that it was up to her to tell me what she wanted me to know, yet knowing what I now did, I wanted to help her. I liked the anonymity of my admittedly small contribution to her well-being. And I liked especially that she clearly had no intention of involving me in her predicament. I had another month in Connecticut and by the time I got back to the city, Madeleine would presumably be as she had been and we could go from there.
In the meantime, Marlene, by example and by design, was teaching me what I needed to be an actor. Interestingly it was a combination of egomania and complete selflessness. In the process of taking on a character, some essence of the self must remain intact. “Never lose yourself on the stage,” Stanislavski famously advised. I saw in Marlene, day after day, something essentially unaltered that absorbed the character she played. She didn’t become Alexandra del Lago, Alexandra del Lago became Marlene Webern. It’s difficult to describe, it sounds abstract and absurd, but for me at that time, it was transformative, allowing for subtleties of interpretation and impression that had hitherto eluded me. Marlene watched me literally like a hawk; it was as if her eye was equipped with a zoom lens that saw straight into the heart of me. Especially when we were onstage together, I could feel that probing eye on me and it charged our time together with what reviewers call “electricity.” Yet she was not, by any means, always focused upon me. Her eyes often wandered
away, resting on some prop item or on her own hands. Sometimes she lifted her chin in my direction but let her eyes go maddeningly out of focus, with that inward smile of hers and an attitude of listening. When she wasn’t watching me, she was intensely listening to me.
I became conscious of how rarely people actually look at or listen to each other in ordinary life, or if they do, how often it’s with ill intent. Marlene’s attention was nonjudgmental, curious, and serene, neither hot nor cold, and it was like that onstage and off.
One Sunday afternoon in the last week of the season, I found myself at loose ends after the children’s production, in which I had a role as a wolf. Acting for children is relaxing; they’re such an open, rambunctious audience, eager to go on the wildest flights of fancy, their little mouths open in helpless ohs and ahs, their eyes dancing with delight at each revelation of the simplistic plot. I’d taken off my wolf makeup and hung up my wolf suit for the last time, and I felt sad about that.
The others had all gone off in a rush after the show. It was a clear, hot day, one in a string of them, and they had planned an outing to the coast for a swim, an opportunity I had declined. I wasn’t up for the beach just yet. As I stepped from the dark theater into the blazing sun the sensation of carrying a weight of gloom became so pronounced I owned it. “I’m sad,” I said to no one, and sat down on the step. I fished in my pocket for a cigarette, lit up, and breathed in the pungent, lethal smoke. Soon I’d be back in the city looking for a job. I heard the creak of the screen door behind me, but I didn’t bother to look up. The stairs were wide, I wasn’t blocking the way. A pair of
tanned feet in red sandals appeared on the wood next to my hip. “I thought everyone went to the shore,” Marlene said. The sun was behind her and I squinted up at her. Her eyes were hidden behind her dark glasses, her hair was loose, her full lips were slightly parted; star power wafted from her like a breeze from another planet. How was it possible that I knew this extraterrestrial beauty? “I don’t care for the beach,” I said.
“I don’t either,” she said, smoothly dropping down on the step beside me. “All that sun is bad for the skin and sand is very unpleasant.”
“You speak against sand?”
“It sticks to everything. It gets into everything.”
I took another drag on my cigarette. “That’s true,” I said.
“You do look the picture of despondency,” she observed. “Has something happened?”
“Not really.”
“Romantic entanglement? Financial reverses?”
“I’m depressed because the summer is nearly over,” I said, “and you’re going back to L.A. and I may never see you again.”
“It has been an excellent season. But you should be energized; you’ve grown as an actor.”
“Have I?”
“Oh, immensely. Don’t you feel it?”
“I feel it when I’m with you.”
“We had a lot of fun with our play.”
“I’ll miss kissing you. I really love kissing you.”
She laughed. “That’s very sweet.”
“No. It’s not.”
“You’ll be kissing someone lovely on the stage in no time.”
“It would help if you’d say you didn’t actually mind kissing me.”
She turned away from me, as if she heard someone approaching, but there was no one. “Actually those scenes were disturbing to me. You remind me so much of my son.”
“Good God,” I said.
“I didn’t want to tell you because I thought it might inhibit you.”
I hadn’t given much thought to Marlene as a mother. When I’d heard about the son, I’d pictured a boy in grammar school, a little leaguer or soccer enthusiast. “How old is your son?” I asked.
“He’s twenty.”
“How is that possible?” I said.
“I was young when he was born.”
“Do I look like him?”
“Not really. It’s something about the way you move. Your gestures remind me of him. You’re much more alive than he is. He’s an unhappy young man, I’m afraid. Not very lively.”
“Why is he unhappy?”
“Probably because his mother is an actress.”
“Is he in school?”
“No. He didn’t do well in school. There were drug problems and he’s very independent, he doesn’t take …” she paused, searching for the right word, “direction.”
“Does he want to be an actor?”
“Oh no. He despises acting.”
“That’s not great,” I said, pointlessly.
Marlene drew herself up and removed her sunglasses. Her
eyes were moist, and her voice, when she spoke, quavered slightly, as from emotion. “I’m worried. Tell me, what is the matter with my son? Why is he so sad and so austere?”
“Chekhov, right?”
She slid the glasses back into place. “Very good,” she said. “It’s Arkadina in
The Seagull
. I’ll be doing it in the spring in Pasadena. So you see, everything is of use.”
“You’re always working.”
“Yes,” she said. “I’ve been fortunate. But you will be too.”
“Not if I don’t find an agent.”
“I thought you had one.”
“No. I don’t.”
“I’ll send you to Barney. He’ll be perfect for you and you for him.” She opened an absurdly small purse and took out her wallet, not, I noted, the one I’d snatched from the bag in the immortal improv. She extracted a card and wrote a name and phone number on the back. “Call him when you get back,” she said. “Tell him I sent you. And I’ll call him to tell him about you. He’ll be expecting you.”
I took the card and studied the name, Barney Marker. “You’re something with these cards that change my life.”
“You’re very talented, you should be encouraged. But I want to advise you about your training. Sandy is a wonderful teacher. Listen to everything he says, but don’t take his criticism too much to heart. There’s a coldness in you that he’ll take offense to, he’ll try to root it out of you, but I think ultimately it will be your strength.”
“You think I’m cold?”
“Part of you is. Yes. The other part is very hot, very passionate. It’s your temperament, and it’s a gift. Not many actors can stand still the way you do.”
“Are you like that?”
“Like what?”
“Hot and cold.”
“I was. These days I’m mostly weary. But when I’m working, I’m all right.”
“I think you’re brilliant,” I said.
She rested her hand on my knee sending a bolt of liquid heat straight to my groin. “I know you do, Edward,” she said. “And that’s very gratifying to me.” My brain, joining in the excitement in my groin, was churning out torrid images.
“Could I ask you something?” I said.
“Of course.”
“You know that photograph you had in your wallet that first time, at school? When we did the improv?”
Her eyebrows knit over the glasses. “No,” she said. “What photo?”
“The one of you, on the couch.”
She drew her hand away and pressed her fingertips against her lips in an expression of deep puzzlement. “A photograph of me?” she said.
“On a couch.”
“My driver’s license is in my wallet. But I’m not on a couch.”
“You’re acting,” I said.
“In the photo?”
“No. Now. You’re having me on.”
She fumbled with the bag. “Would you like to see my wallet?”
“No,” I said. “It’s not the same one.”