This was true. I felt bruised by the latest scene with Guy and I’d run to Teddy for moral support. “Did Madeleine seem like a crazy person to you?” I asked.
“It’s hard to say. She’s a good actress. Now that I think about it, she didn’t talk much. Maybe she was a little tense. Guy went on and on about the audition. He was more excited than she was.”
“Did you talk about me?”
“I did. I told them about the Strindberg. But I didn’t know about this audition. Why didn’t you call me?”
“I didn’t call anyone. I’m superstitious about this one, it feels big. I’m almost afraid to talk to myself about it.”
“How did Guy find out?”
“That’s what I’d like to know,” I said. “Jesus, what am I going to do? I’m wrecked now. I’m completely unsure of myself.”
“You’re seriously thinking of backing out?”
“Barney will murder me.”
“Is it because of what Guy said about Madeleine, or what he said about your acting? Or the other thing?”
“The debt?”
“The debt,” Teddy said.
“Do you think he has the right to ask me to do this?”
“He wasn’t exactly asking.”
“That’s true. He never asks. He doesn’t think he has to.”
Teddy said nothing, gazing into his Scotch, letting me work it out for myself.
“Is there some kind of cosmic thing that will backfire on me and ruin my career if I defy Guy Margate?”
Teddy dug into the ice bucket on the table and added a few cubes to his glass. The spirit of Wayne hung over the room; every inch of wall space was covered with his paintings. We were munching Chinese rice crackers. All agreed, it was impressive that Teddy and Wayne had stayed together so long, though Mindy maintained their longevity was the result of Teddy’s willingness to support Wayne in a style to which he had quickly become accustomed. I thought it had more to do with Wayne being exotic, the lure of the East and all that distantly smiling serenity. I recalled Guy’s description of the Eastern view, that because he had saved me, he was obligated to look after me. Was it possible that in his mixed-up brain he thought that was what he was doing? “Do you think he’s trying to save me from myself?” I said.
“When’s the audition?” Teddy said.
“Thursday.”
He rubbed his cheek with the palm of his hand, ruminating upon my case.
“There’s no guarantee I’ll get the part,” I said. “Especially now, since I’m going to be completely conflicted about it.”
“I can’t tell you what to do,” Teddy said.
“I know.”
“But I can tell you that what Guy said about your acting isn’t true. You’re a gifted actor; everyone knows it.”
“Thanks.”
“I envy you. So does Guy. That’s what this is about.”
I nodded, stuck for something to say. Teddy had left Stella Adler years ago and gone to Meisner for a while, then he tried Uta Hagen and then Julie Bovasso; he was a connoisseur of acting teachers, evidently unwilling to give up being a student. His performances were in showcases and rare at that. I’d seen him a few times over the years, always in small parts that he made the best of, but there was something inhibited about his work. I recalled how certain he’d been at the dawn of Wayne that the acknowledgment of his sexual identity would have a liberating effect on his acting, but that hadn’t happened. If anything he was less confident, more tentative. Wayne’s complete indifference to what was, after all, Teddy’s art didn’t help. Before Wayne, his friends were all actors, comrades-in-arms; now he spent his time at gallery openings, where painters sniped at one another, or at gay bars where one’s professional aspirations were not the subject. He stayed in acting classes because it was the only way he could still fancy himself an actor.
“I’ve been lucky,” I said.
“You have in some ways,” Teddy agreed. “Though not in love.”
“I’d sure like to see Madeleine,” I said.
“Best wait until this audition thing is behind you both.”
“That’s true,” I agreed. “I don’t want to muck up her chances. How does she look?”
“She’s more beautiful than ever,” Teddy said.
“How could she have married that guy?”
“Guy,” Teddy said. We smirked.
“He looks terrible,” I said. “What’s with his eyes? Is he on drugs?”
“He’s on desperation,” Teddy said.
“It’s so unfair,” I said. “If I had to drown, I don’t see why someone decent couldn’t have saved me. Why couldn’t
you
have saved me? I wouldn’t mind owing you my life for a second.”
Teddy’s expression was wistful. “I can’t swim,” he said.
I
left Teddy in a mood as black and bitter as the frigid streets I walked through. I had to make a decision but I didn’t want to think about it: I knew thinking wasn’t going to help. Guy had attacked on three emotional fronts: my feelings for Madeleine, my personal sense of obligation to him for saving my life, and my insecurity as an actor. I might rationally decide that I would or would not undertake the audition, but emotionally I was a shambles.
It wasn’t late, but the streets were quiet. A taxi whooshed by, ferrying a lone, pale citizen swathed in fur. A few pedestrians
hurried from building to building, paddling the air with their bulky arms, simultaneously urged to speed by the cold and to caution by the ice. The Village was just entering the long period of gentrification which would not end until all but the most litigious of its residents were driven to points east and south. My building, which had so far escaped even a cosmetic coat of paint, huddled before me, the shabbiest on the block. The windows were dark, save the third-floor front, where an impoverished novelist, who would later enjoy a small but respectable following, scribbled into the wee hours of morning. I grasped the stair rail with my gloved hand and mounted the sticky, salt-strewn steps to the front door. Like most New York apartments, mine was overheated, and I was looking forward to the blast of warm air that would greet me after the long haul to the fourth floor. Somewhere between the first and second landing a memory eluded the thought police and burst into the full sensory-surround screen of my consciousness. It was Madeleine leaning into me on this staircase, her arm wrapped around my back, her hand resting on my shoulder, her eyes and lips raised to mine, that night after we’d come back from the Jersey shore, when I’d outwaited and outwitted Guy at the bar. How long ago that was; it seemed another world, though the truth I didn’t know then was that I hadn’t changed at all. I would change later.
As I trudged ever upward with this ghost of Madeleine clinging to my side, regret and anger percolated in my gut, while fatigue closed down various circuits in my brain. I flipped the locks on the apartment door and headed straight for
bed. Madeleine was everywhere I looked, but especially behind my eyelids. As I drifted into sleep I heard her voice guiding me. “This way, Edward. This way.” I thought about the scene at the bookstore, that night before the last night I’d seen her. “You shocking girl,” I said, feeling pleased with myself. I knew I would dream of her and I did.
This was my dream. It was so odd that in the morning I wrote it down, so the details are exact. Madeleine and I entered a bedroom that looked a bit like a stage set. The furniture was oversized and crowded together; there were two doors, stage right and left, and upstage a heavy maroon curtain covered the entire wall. The bed was unmade, the sheets rumpled, a wadded quilt, resembling a dead body, hung over the foot. Madeleine turned to me and we kissed. I was eager to get her into the bed, but enjoying the deep openmouthed kiss too much to break it off. At length she pulled away and said, “Are you hungry?”
I knew then that I was famished. “Yes,” I said. She stepped behind the curtain, reappearing almost at once with a plate of roast turkey balanced on one open hand, a knife, fork, and white napkin in the other. All this she arranged on the dressing table, motioning me to take a seat on the poufy stool in front of it. “I have to get ready for bed,” she said. “Eat this and I’ll be right back.”
I settled down to the repast. Dream efficiency supplied a glass of cold white wine. As Madeleine went off behind the curtain, I took up the knife and fork and began to eat. The turkey was superb; I was certain I’d never had better. It was
tender and moist, warm and flavorful. It’s not easy to cook turkey this well, I thought. It’s usually dry and stringy, like chewing a wrung-out mop, but this meat fairly melted in my mouth. Sleeping or waking, I know I’ve never come across a better bird.
As these cheerful observations passed through my brain, and the turkey disappeared down my gullet, I heard a shuffling outside the stage-right door. I put down my cutlery and stared at the door’s reflection in the mirror of the dresser, moved by a dim premonition of what was about to happen. Abruptly the door flew open and Guy Margate stepped in. “What?” he exclaimed, observing me on my pouf. “You here?” Our eyes barely crossed in the mirror. He went to the bed, pulled his sweater off and tossed it on the floor. Then he did the same with his T-shirt, belt, pants, socks, and underpants. I watched him in the mirror as I finished the remains of the turkey. It made me uncomfortable, especially the girlish grin he sent me as he stripped off his underwear and dropped them, with a flourish, onto the pile, but I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of ruining my meal. Naked, he fell to rearranging the pillows, straightening the sheets, shaking out the quilt. Then he slipped under the covers and turned his back to me.
I drained my wineglass. I could hear Madeleine behind the curtain, running water, brushing her teeth. “I’ll be right there, darling,” she said. Guy didn’t move. The curtain rustled and she appeared, dressed in a scrumptious negligee, her hair falling loosely over her bare shoulders. She passed me without speaking and climbed into the bed, scooting close to Guy and pressing
her lips against the nape of his neck, his back. “Darling,” she said.
She thinks he’s me, I thought.
Guy flipped over like a fish tossed on a dock, kicking off the quilt. Madeleine screamed. She jumped up on her hands and knees and crawled to the side of the bed. At last she saw me, my back was to her, and I watched her in the mirror as she swung her legs over the edge, covered her face with her hands, and burst into sobs. Guy, very still now, eyed her coldly. It struck me as funny; I don’t know why. I laughed and Guy laughed. We laughed together at poor Madeleine, who wept inconsolably I woke up.
What a ridiculous dream. I didn’t even get to have sex with Madeleine; all I’d managed was a kiss. And why the turkey? What was the significance of the turkey?
I don’t put much credit in dreams, but Madeleine always did. When we lived together she liked to hear my dreams and to speculate about the meaning of their random components. I have such odd ones—sometimes they’re more like stories and I’m not even in them. Madeleine had a book she’d picked up somewhere, a dictionary of dream symbols, which gave the ancient prophetic interpretations of an astonishing array of terms. Once I’d had a dream in which I struggled with an enormous piece of tree bark. “Tree bark,” Madeleine read. “A danger-go-slow warning in regard to the opposite sex.” We both shouted with laughter, for it was the night after she’d moved her records and books into my apartment. “Too late,” she said. “Poor Edward, it’s too late to go slow now.”
Another night I’d spent my dream time trying to warm myself by a cold radiator. “Remorse over an alienated friend is signified in a dream of a cold radiator.”
“What could the ancients possibly have known about radiators?” I scoffed.
“The Romans had hot water,” she correctly observed. “They had steam heat.”
Thus my memory of Madeleine on the stair provoked a foolish dream and now the dream led me to recollections of daily life with Madeleine. I sat up in the bed and regarded my impressive erection. The erotically charged atmosphere of the dream had not yet dissipated: the kiss, then the turkey, then Guy’s surprise entrance. He’d taken my place in the bed, but it didn’t do him any good because it was me Madeleine wanted. The sight of him made her scream.
To act or not to act; that was the question.
My eyes fell on the Chekhov script I’d left atop my clothes piled on the floor.
You’re a sly one
, Astrov says to Elena, when she quizzes him about his feelings for poor, plain Sonya.
You beautiful, fluffy little weasel … you must have victims
. I picked up the script and turned to that confrontation. Was it
“you
beautiful weasel” or
“a
beautiful weasel”? It was
a
. At the end of the speech Astrov folds his arms, bows his head.
I submit
, he says.
Here I am, devour me!
It’s a declaration rich with irony, he’s teasing her, but it’s not entirely a jest. Astrov is a sensible man, a doctor, and a botanist; he cares about what future generations will think of his generation. He has little hope that the destruction of the local environment can be stopped, but he has to try, so he plants trees. His attraction to Elena, a lazy, selfish, desperate,
beautiful siren who enchants him from the first moment he sees her, is serious. He knows this passion could be the wreck of him, yet he can’t resist it.
I put down the script and stood up, thinking of myself as Astrov and Madeleine as Elena. How would she play her response to my plea to be devoured? Her line is simple:
You are out of your mind!
Does she believe that? It would depend on what I gave her. I crossed my arms and announced to the dresser: “I submit, here I am.” I dropped to my knees, opening my arms, offering my naked plea: “Devour me!”
Then I got up, felt around for my slippers, and padded off to the bathroom. “Elena, you vixen,” I shouted. “Your Astrov is coming to save you.”
That was how I reached my decision—lightly. Playfully, as an actor, not as a friend of one or a lover of the other, not in defiance or in anger, but as one who is offered a prize and reaches out to take it. The audition was the following afternoon. I had purchased a bottle of dye to add silver at my temples and a tin of shadow to darken the light creases under my eyes. As I applied it, I thought of how much older Guy appeared than me; his looks, like Astrov’s, were ruined. I raised my eyebrows to bug my eyes out like his, but that wasn’t right. Astrov was exhausted, not tense. I recalled the stoop of Guy’s shoulders, his tic of correcting it. I’m tall; I carry my shoulders back and low. I practiced at the mirror, trying out various degrees of slouch. I discovered it wasn’t only at the shoulders; it started at the diaphragm. The belly was slack. I stepped back from the mirror to get a longer view. Years, I thought with satisfaction. It added years.