“Me too.”
“Every time you read a line I had to cross my legs.”
“Does that help?”
“No,” I said. “Only one thing really helps.”
She snorted. I turned onto my side and smoothed her hair back with my palm. “I like your hair like this.”
“I think Elena will pull it all up.”
“But with the curls in the front.”
“Um,” she said. We were quiet then while the world fell back into place.
“So,” I said. “How have you been?”
She gave me an incredulous smile. “Pretty good. Up until last Wednesday.”
“What happened then?”
“I found out you were playing Astrov.”
“And that was bad news?”
“That was shocking news.”
“How did Guy take it?”
“Not well.”
“That doesn’t surprise me.”
“No?” She was pressing little kisses down the inside of my forearm.
“Did he tell you he came to see me?”
She closed her eyes, taking in a slow breath. “When?” she said softly.
“When you were here for the audition. He came to my play and he came to the dressing room and he tried to talk me out of doing the audition.”
“I think I don’t need to know this,” she said.
This annoyed me. “I wish I didn’t know it,” I said. She was silent. “Do you have any idea how he found out I was up for the part?”
“No,” she said. We were very still then, while the specter of Guy Margate slid into the bed between us. “He’s been having a hard time,” she said, turning away from me.
“I know. He told me.”
“What did he say?”
“He said he was killing himself.”
“I feel sorry for him.”
“You’ve a funny way of showing it.”
She looked back over her shoulder. “What do you mean?”
I gestured to the room, the wreck of the bed, our clothes commingled on the floor.
“He must never know about this.”
“He thinks you love him.”
“Did he say that?”
“Yes. He said, ‘Maddie loves me.’”
She turned over to face me, frowning.
“Maddie,” I said. A blush started at her throat and swept up to her cheeks.
“I don’t know what to tell you,” she said.
“You could start by telling me why you married him.”
“I was pregnant. You rejected me. He was so kind, he loves me so much.”
“I rejected you?”
“You sent that chilly postcard.”
“That wasn’t rejection, Madeleine. That was a postcard. I never got the chance to reject you.”
“But you would have. I knew that.”
I rushed past this arguable point. “Another thing I’d like to know is when you started sleeping with him. Was it before I left for Connecticut?”
She pursed her lips and fluttered her eyelashes.
“It was before, right?”
“By sleeping with him, you mean when did I first have sex with him, right?”
“Exactly. When did you start fucking him? That’s my question.”
She allowed a dramatic pause, concentrating on the ceiling while tears welled up in her eyes. “I’ve never had sex with Guy,” she said.
“Oh please,” I said.
“It’s unbelievable, isn’t it?” she said.
“Completely.”
“Nevertheless, it’s true.”
I suppose my mouth dropped open and some version of amazement sat upon my brow. It was as if she’d handed me one of those sudoku puzzles everyone is so mad for these
days; I was conscious of a pattern I’d never noticed before and certain numbers were falling neatly into place. “So, he’s gay,” I said.
She gave a sad smile to the ceiling. “I wish it was that simple,” she said.
“Madeleine,” I said. “What are you telling me?”
She glanced fleetingly at my face then resolutely back at the ceiling. “Guy is impotent,” she said. Immediately upon this revelation the tears overflowed and a strangled sob burst from her throat. I rolled upon my back, staring blankly at her crumpled profile and the tears streaming down her cheeks into her ears.
“You mean—” I said.
“Completely,” she whimpered.
I rubbed my forehead with the heel of my hand. “So you’ve been married six years and there’s no sex?”
She squeezed her eyes closed, nodding her head.
“He gets in bed with you and he can’t get it up?”
A moan, sniffing, and gasping. “I swore to myself I’d never tell you,” she said. “I’ve betrayed him.”
“So you haven’t had sex in six years?”
“Mumble, director, mumble, mumble Yale.”
“What?”
Big sigh. “I had an affair with the director of the Yale play last fall. It was awful. That’s the only time, until now.”
“There was that time in the bookstore.”
“You’re right. I should never have done that.”
“So you feel guilty for wanting to have sex every few years.”
“You don’t understand.”
“It’s crazy,” I said. “You know that, don’t you?”
She nodded again.
“It’s just not normal. Has he been to a doctor?”
“It’s psychological. He had a brutal childhood, his father left, his mother did sick things to him.”
“You’ve got to leave him.”
She put her hands over her face, wiping the tears away. “I can’t. It would kill him.”
“It won’t kill him,” I said. “You’re just being dramatic. He has no right to ask you to live like this.”
“He took care of me when I needed him.”
“That was his choice,” I said.
“And he saved your life.”
“As he never fails to remind me.”
“We owe him so much.”
“That doesn’t mean we have to like him.”
She considered this. “We don’t have to like him. But we can’t try to destroy him. You must feel that, Edward.”
I sat up and swung my legs over the bedside. “I don’t feel it,” I protested. “I know I should, I know I’m obligated to him. He saved my life and I’m obligated to him, but I don’t feel it. I just don’t feel it.”
Madeleine said nothing. She’d stopped crying and when I looked back she was arranging a pillow under her head. “He told me he wished he’d let me drown,” I concluded.
“Perhaps he does.”
“So why do I have to care what happens to him when he wishes I was dead?”
“Because he would never do anything to hurt you.”
“You think not?”
She pondered this. “He has his own demons.”
“Great,” I said. “The demon has demons.” I got up and went to the bathroom, where I drank a glass of water and looked at myself in the mirror. I had an incipient mustache; I was growing it for Astrov, who talks about his mustache in the first act. It made me look older, sinister. I didn’t like it. I raised my eyebrows and made my eyes bug out like Guy’s. “What time is he coming?” I called back to Madeleine.
“Late,” she said. “His train gets in at ten thirty.”
I stood in the doorway looking down at her. She was stretched out with her head propped up, her hair waving out in all directions over the pillow. I felt enormously sad. The cruel irony of her fate wasn’t lost on me. She’d been dealt a very poor hand and had tried to make the best of it, but she’d lost the game.
“Are you living with anyone?” she asked.
“No,” I said. “There’s a woman I see. She’s a lighting tech.”
“Are you in love with her?”
“No. It’s not serious.”
“Oh,” she said, idly scratching the inside of her thigh. This caused the breast resting against her arm to jiggle lightly. She lifted one knee, the better to get at the thigh, her eyes all the while resting on me. I felt a pleasant tingling in the groin, which resulted in a visible indicator of my emotions. Cause and effect—where would we be without it?
“Oh, look,” Madeleine said, pointing at me with girlish surprise.
“What can I say,” I said, looking down at my steadily lifting member.
“As I understand it,” she said, “only one thing works.” She patted the sheet and I crossed the narrow space, clambering in beside her.
Madeleine was as flexible as a reed. She had a remarkably strong back and open hips; she could do a backbend from a standing position and sit in the demanding full lotus for hours on end. She liked being pulled about, folded and unfolded like an accordion. Her ankles were over my shoulders and her knees pressed into the mattress when we heard three sharp raps at the door. We froze, our eyes locked in alarm. “Who is it?” Madeleine called sweetly. There was no answer. “Wrong room!” I exclaimed. Madeleine was sweating; her upper lip gleamed in the dim light. We heard the key slide into the lock—one click. The door, scraping against the cheap carpet, said “Shhh” as Guy, lugging a suitcase, stepped into the room.
Let’s play this as a comic scene. The only sound is the obscene pop of my cock coming free of Madeleine as I lurch backward and she dives for the floor. Guy stands speechless in the open doorway with what I take at first to be a grin on his face. Madeleine is scrambling, pulling in articles of her clothing. I arrange myself cross-legged on the edge of the mattress facing him, but he does not move. “For God’s sake,” I say to him. “Close the door.”
His face is a mask, the grin not glee but terror. His eyes take in the room, his panicked wife on the floor, his own reflection in the mirror over the dresser, the disheveled bed, and the unabashedly naked me, facing him, waiting upon his next
move. What’s odd is how calm I feel, how guiltless. As our eyes meet he apprehends this; it does something to him. In that moment it’s out in the open between us: we are enemies.
Quietly, still clutching the suitcase, he steps back into the hall, pulling the door closed behind him. Madeleine is sobbing on the floor. “Oh God,” she repeats, though I know she is not a believer. No sound from the hall; he’s just standing on the other side of the door. Will he change his mind and reappear, charged for confrontation? “Calm down,” I advise Madeleine, who sits up dazedly, pulling her blouse over her head. “He’s going.”
Another moment. She’s holding her breath. Then we hear the creak of the floorboards as Guy, yielding the stage, treads stolidly off into the wings.
A
fter Guy left, Madeleine and I argued about what we should do. I wanted her to leave with me at once; she wanted to wait for Guy’s return. She was certain he would come back. In the end I left and she waited. Near eleven, the time when he had been originally expected, Guy appeared at the hotel-room door, shaken but resolved. He described himself as disappointed in Madeleine, though not surprised that I would take advantage of her weakness.
“Your weakness,” I said. “What century is he living in?” “He cried all night,” she said. “He’s had such a hard time. You and I have been working; we can’t understand what he’s going through. It’s as if he’s been shut out of the theater and
now we have these great parts and the minute we’re together we betray him. He trusted us, and we betrayed him.”
“He cried?”
“I didn’t sleep ten minutes.”
“So what is he going to do?” I asked. We were speaking softly in the hall outside the rehearsal stage.
“He’s quitting his job,” she said. “He’s moving to the hotel until we can find an apartment. He’s delivering me to rehearsals in the morning and picking me up at night.”
“But that’s absurd,” I said. “You’re not his prisoner.”
She smiled, misty eyed. “I’m a prisoner of this play. So is Elena.”
“What is this, method acting?”
She rested a trembling hand on my forearm. “I can only see you here and only kiss you as Elena.”
“I can’t stand this,” I said. “I’m going to follow you when you leave and punch his nose in.”
“Don’t,” she said. A trio of our fellow actors, exiting the elevator, filed past us to the door. “Don’t try to hurt him.”
“You’ve got to leave him, Madeleine.”
“Not yet. Not now. I can’t be that cruel.”
Peter Smythe, peeking gnomically from the open door, announced, “Here they are in the hall. Aren’t you coming in, lovebirds?”
I
n general the actor’s memoir is divided into two parts: stirring tales of my youthful artistic suffering followed by charming profiles
of all the famous people who admire me. I’m not sure why this genre is popular, as nothing could be more boring than an actor’s life and actors are such a self-absorbed and narcissistic lot, they’re unlikely to make good narrators. Katharine Hepburn got it right when she titled her tiresome paean to herself simply
Me
.
Fortunately for my readers, this memoir is different. In this memoir something memorable actually happened. If you are over forty you may have read about it in the papers, though it was far from front-page news. It was a curious item quickly buried in the back pages.
Now, as I approach the big event, it occurs to me that there may be those among you who, through some fault in your stars or your education, are unfamiliar with Anton Chekhov’s
Uncle Vanya
. In this case you must fail to appreciate how bizarrely the events Madeleine and I acted out upon the stage echoed the anxious lives we put on hold to take our parts. For this reason I pause at what I hope is a suspenseful moment to tell you a little about the play.
There’s no summarizing the plot of a Chekhov play One might say they all have the same plot. A group of unhappy characters come together at a provincial estate and complain about the emptiness of their lives, the hopelessness of trying to do any good in the world or to find satisfaction in work or love. Invariably they imagine real life is elsewhere, most likely in Moscow. The “action” of the play takes place offstage, thereby circumventing melodrama. Dispossession, either of property, of virtue, or of hope for the future, is the process the characters unwittingly facilitate. The world outside the estate is changing. It is coarsening; it is being deforested, developed,
and exploited. Through indolence, ignorance, or indifference, in the course of the play each of the privileged characters will lose what he or she most values.
Uncle Vanya
concerns a family in possession of a country estate that brings in less and less money each year, despite the efforts of the eponymous Uncle Vanya and his niece, Sonya, who labor incessantly to keep it solvent. Of the older generation, only the mother, Maria, a tract-reading feminist in thrall to her son-in-law, survives. The son-in-law, Serebryakov, is a professor of literature at a distant university. His wife, Vanya’s sister, Petrovna, has died. It is the visit of this revered professor, in reality an aging windbag in declining health, with his young and beautiful second wife Elena that springs the action of the play Mikhail Astrov, the family doctor and friend to Vanya, is called in to care for the hypochondriac Serebryakov. In spite of himself Astrov is struck by Elena’s beauty and drawn to her. Vanya too is madly, hopelessly, openly in love with her and makes a comic show of his feelings, following her about, teasing her about her laziness and uselessness, complaining to Astrov about what a crime it is that she is faithful to the professor.
To deceive an old husband you can’t endure—that’s immoral; but to try to stifle your pitiful youth and vital feelings—is not immoral
, he tells Astrov.