Then we had the whole fraudulent business of her sounding me out about my feelings for Sonya.
Emotionally this is an intensely complicated scene; it’s a showstopper. Elena and Astrov are attracted to each other and have been repressing this attraction for reasons that are both personal and social. The attraction is purely sexual; it has been
growing on a daily basis for a month in which they have been constantly together but never alone. Now, at last, they are alone. They are as concentrated as two people can be. A tiger could leap through the window and they won’t notice. He declares himself:
I submit. Here I am, devour me!
And she puts up a flimsy show of resistance:
Oh, I am not so low—I am not so bad as you think!
But it’s a sham. He takes her in his arms, she struggles, but weakly.
Where shall we meet?
he begs her.
Someone may come in, tell me quickly … what a wonderful, glorious … one kiss
.
And at last, they kiss. We kissed.
Because of the arrangement of the entrances near the stage, the gunshot sounded as if it came from the audience in the right orchestra seats. It startled a few cries out of those closest to the door, but no one bolted. Madeleine jerked in my arms. Had he shot her? I held her fast, running my hands along her spine, releasing her lips and lifting her face so that I could look into her eyes. Her gaze was clouded by desire and she brought her hand to the back of my neck, stretching up to meet my lips with hers. As there was no reaction from anyone resembling an authority, and no further disturbance of the airwaves, the moment passed. Some innocents may have thought the shot was part of the play I held Madeleine fast, stroking her hair and pulling her in close at the waist, so overcome by desire that I wanted to force her down onto the floor and have at it right there in front of the audience. Who cares? I thought, my brain sparking like a power line cut loose by a lightning bolt. I’ve got her now. She eased her mouth from mine and I pressed her cheek against my chest, allowing my other hand to stray over her hips. Behind me, Vanya entered stage right, carrying the
bouquet of roses he’d gathered for her. Neither of us could see him yet.
Somewhere in my consciousness the gunshot was being judiciously minimized and filed away. There would be some harmless explanation for it; it could have been the blank gun Vanya would fire in the next act, or perhaps it wasn’t a gun at all, but some amp blowing out—there was a lot of voltage out there. Elena was strangely limp in my arms. I felt a hiccup against my collarbone—was she weeping? I lifted her chin and looked into her wet eyes. As the tears overflowed she said something that startled me almost as much as the gunshot.
I am not so bad as you think
.
It wasn’t her line. The prompter whispered the correction. I held her by the wrist and shoulder, turning her to face Vanya, but she didn’t see him. She was sobbing now, but she caught her breath and said,
I am not so bad as you think
. She was supposed to break away from me and run to the window. Again the prompter gave her the line:
This is awful
.
Never mind, never mind
, Vanya said. He and I exchanged a look freighted with worry. I launched into my little speech about the weather, after which I was to make a hasty, embarrassed exit stage right, while Elena must remain onstage through the long scene in which Serebryakov threatens to sell the house, and Vanya, in a fury, tries to shoot him with the pistol.
I’m not so bad as you think
, Elena said again.
Vanya dropped the flowers.
I saw everything, Helene
.
I’m not so bad as you think
, she repeated.
I paused at the entrance to the wings, opening my hands to
Vanya who understood my gesture. We had to get Madeleine offstage. Serebryakov, Sonya, Telyegin, and Marina were beginning their entrance stage left. Madeleine didn’t move. She stood there like Lucia di Lammermoor, a pale and fading rose, her eyes clouded, her lips parted, gazing hopelessly beyond the audience, as lost as a soul in hell. I glanced at the prompter, his eyes aghast over his bifocals, giving her, for the third time, her line
—I must leave here—
but she was indifferent to him. Vanya approached her.
You must leave here
, he said. He took her arm and to the relief of the entire cast and crew, now frozen in apprehension, she didn’t struggle.
You must leave here this very day
, Vanya said. Cautiously he guided her to me as the others entered the stage in the midst of an idle conversation about the vicissitudes of age. Serebryakov, whose line was
Where are the others?
, cleverly adjusted it to
Where is Maria Vasilyevna?
I didn’t get to hear how they improvised for the now absent Elena because Peter Smythe appeared, sweating but competent, motioning me into the wings. Together we led Madeleine through the dark backstage to the lighted landing above the dressing rooms. “I’ll send in the understudy for the last act,” he said. “It’ll be a mess, but we don’t have a choice. They’ll have to fake it through the rest of this scene.”
“She doesn’t have many lines,” I said. Madeleine stiffened between us, staring in wide-eyed panic at my open dressing-room door. Three policemen were gathered there, two engaged in conversation, the third speaking loudly into a bulky cell-phone precursor. “No,” she said, pulling away from us. Peter stepped in front of her, blocking her view. We steered her toward the dimly lit kitchen off the greenroom. “It’s all right,”
Peter said calmly. “Let’s go in here and I’ll fix you a nice cup of tea.” Madeleine craned her neck, looking past me. “Is someone in there?” she asked.
“It’s OK, sweetheart,” I said. “It’s nothing for you to worry about.”
She gave me an uncomprehending look. Her face was tear-streaked, her nose red and damp. She sniffed, bringing the back of her hand to her nostrils. I pulled my handkerchief from my pocket. “Here,” I said, “use this.”
“Thank you,” she said. She blew her nose discreetly, folded the cloth, and handed it back to me, a faint, diffident smile on her lips. “I don’t believe we’ve met,” she said.
T
o this day I don’t know how we managed to get through the fourth act. Of course the audience noticed that Madeleine had been replaced by her understudy, and as they trundled out into the street, they doubtless speculated about what might have happened. Was she taken ill or had some emergency required her to leave the stage? If they read the Metro section the next day in the
Times
they might have noticed a brief article about the suicide of an unemployed actor in a dressing room at the Public Theater. Otherwise, Guy’s exit went unnoticed by the wide, searching eye of the press.
Because I was the last to see Guy alive, I was subjected to an interview with Detective DiBanco, a short, hirsute investigator with a Napoleonic gleam in his eye. He was waiting for me in the wings at the end of the show, and he escorted me to the door of my dressing room. The other actors were encouraged
by the attending officers to gather their belongings and leave the theater. Guy’s body had been removed and Madeleine spirited away by Peter Smythe. Orange tape was stretched across the open door to the dressing room. I tried to avoid looking at the pool of brownish blood congealing on the floor.
It was unusual, Detective DiBanco informed me, for a suicide to shoot himself in the chest. “It’s hard to be accurate,” he said. “Most choose the temple, or they just put the barrel in their mouths.”
“Well,” I said, “he was an actor.”
“Why does that make a difference?”
I gaped at his innocence. “An actor doesn’t want to mess up his face.”
“Was he a friend of yours?”
I wasn’t sure how to answer this. The scene had a dreamy artificiality about it, and my emotions had simply shut down. I couldn’t feel a thing. DiBanco was a professional; he hung on my answer with actor-worthy concentration. What should I tell him? Should I begin on the Jersey shore? At last I punted. “I hadn’t seen him in a long time,” I said.
“So he just dropped by your dressing room to kill himself?”
I searched for a shorthand version. “His wife is in the play,” I said. “We were lovers, he was jealous. I think he planned to shoot me, but he didn’t have the courage.”
Detective DiBanco pulled down the corners of his mouth, nodding his head ponderously, for all the world like a cop in a TV drama. “Did he threaten you?” he asked.
“In a way. Yes. I’d say he did.”
He gazed up at me; he had to lift his chin to do this, and I
noticed a red notch on the jawbone where he’d nicked himself shaving the thick stubble that surged over his chin. “He left a kind of note,” he said. “But it doesn’t make any sense. Maybe it will make sense to you.”
“A kind of note?”
“I’ll show you,” he said, pulling the tape aside. Reluctantly I followed him, keeping as much distance between my feet and the blood as I could. Guy’s blood, I thought, and a reflex of nausea fired an acrid shot of vomit into my throat which I swallowed back manfully.
“It’s on the mirror,” DiBanco said, unnecessarily, for as he spoke my eyes discovered Guy’s final condemnation. He’d used a brown liner crayon to draw a picture frame with a small rectangle at the base, like a title plate, in which he’d carefully inscribed my name. Above the frame, scrawled in startling red lipstick, was a single word:
INGRATE
.
I took my place as he’d known I would, so that I filled the frame. It made me smile, this last joke of Guy’s; it was so sophomoric, so ridiculous, so totally Guy.
“I see it makes sense to you,” Detective DiBanco observed.
“A long time ago,” I confessed, “Guy Margate saved my life.”
A
t my apartment, to my relief, there was a phone message from Peter Smythe, which I returned at once. “How is she?” I asked.
“She’s asleep,” he said.
“Does she know what happened?”
“It’s very strange,” he said. “She’s calm, but she doesn’t
know anything, who I am, where she is. I don’t think she recognizes her own name, but she’s decided to believe I know it.”
“This is terrible,” I said.
“I called a shrink I know. He said she may snap out of it. She said she was tired, so Mary gave her a gown and a toothbrush, showed her the guest room, and she went to bed. The door is open; we’ll hear her if she gets up in the night. Are you OK?”
“I have no idea,” I said.
“Can you do the matinee tomorrow?”
“Yes,” I said. “I can do it.”
“Call me in the morning,” he said. “We’ll figure out what to do. Do you know Madeleine’s family?”
“No,” I said. “Guy knew her mother. I never did.”
“Jesus, what a thing to do. What was wrong with that guy?”
“Guy?” I said. “I guess he snapped. He couldn’t get a job.”
“Yeah, yeah, it’s a hell of a profession,” Peter said. “We’re all crazy from it.”
“That’s true,” I agreed.
After I hung up the phone I switched off the lamp and sat in the dark for a few minutes. I could hear Guy laughing at me. “We called you the warm-up act.” Was that the last thing he said to me? Was there any possibility that it was true, that he and Madeleine were in some sort of complicity against me, that there was another cruel story I didn’t know anything about? Or was it just another of Guy’s ploys, right there at the end, to shake my confidence, to get even with me because I had succeeded and he had failed?
Naturally I preferred the latter proposition, but I also admitted that I would probably never be sure, as Guy was gone and Madeleine, if she could even remember her story, would have a strong personal interest in sticking to it.
Guy is gone, I said to the empty darkness pressing against me. But I hadn’t seen his body. They’d taken him and the backpack and the pistol away sometime during the last act. A sinister doubt crept in from the dime-store-mystery plotting lobe of the brain: What if Guy wasn’t really dead? Then the police would have to be in on it, also Peter, who had identified Guy. Impossible, right? But no sooner had the thought crossed my mind than a creak and crunch issued from the bedroom, as of someone rising from the bed. My trembling fingers shot out for the lamp switch, but it wasn’t where it had always been. “Christ,” I muttered, feeling around until I found it exactly where it had always been.
The light blasted my eyes. The bedroom door was ajar. I could see the empty bed and the dresser, just as I had left them, but I had to get up, cross the room, and look behind the door. That was when I decided to go out. It was midnight and it was chilly; people with sense were all in bed. I didn’t want to talk to strangers; I didn’t want to be alone. I called Teddy.
He was awake; he had, he said, just come in, and how was I.
“Not great,” I said. “Guy Margate shot himself in my dressing room during the show tonight.”
“My God,” Teddy said. “Are you serious?”
“Yes. He’s dead, and Madeleine doesn’t know who she is.”
“Ed,” Teddy said. “Where are you?”
“I’m in my apartment, but I can’t stay here. I’m too creeped out. I need a drink. Can you come out and meet me somewhere?”
“Hold on,” he said. He talked to someone, Wayne no doubt, but I couldn’t make out what he was saying. “I’ll meet you at Phebe’s,” he said. “I’ll leave right now.”
“Thanks,” I said. “I’ll be there.”
Teddy was waiting on the porch but as soon as he saw me he came out and steered me into the small room behind the bar. He had evidently spoken to the bartender, for a bottle of whiskey and two glasses with ice cubes melting in them were set up on a table. This dark room wasn’t ordinarily open unless the crowd overflowed, so we had it to ourselves. “I would have told you to come to the apartment,” Teddy said, “but Wayne invited some people from the opening in for drinks. Do you want something to eat?”
“Wayne had an opening?” I said.
“No. It wasn’t his. A friend. Awful pictures.” He poured the whiskey over the ice, his eyes moving from his hand to me and back again, animated by solicitude. He slid the glass to me. After I swilled a good draught, I thumped the glass down on the table with a sigh. “Thanks,” I said. “That helps.”