The Humbling (9 page)

When dessert arrived he said to Pegeen, "There's a girl at the bar getting drunk."

"What does she look like?"

"Like she can take care of herself."

"You want to?"

"If you do," he said.

"How old is she?" she said.

"I'd say twenty-eight. You'd be in charge. You and the green cock."

"You'd be in charge," she said to him. "You and the real cock."

"We'd be in charge together," he said.

"I want to see her," she said.

He paid the bill and they left the restaurant and went to stand in the doorway of the bar. He stood behind Pegeen with his arms encircling her. He could feel her trembling with excitement as she watched the girl drinking at the bar. Her trembling thrilled him. It was as though they had merged into one maniacally tempted being.

"You like her?" he whispered.

"She looks as if she could be quite indecent, given half a chance. She looks like she's ready for a life of crime."

"You want to take her home."

"She's not Lara but she'd do."

"What if she vomits in the car?"

"You think she's about to?"

"She's been at it a long time. When she passes out at the house, how do we get rid of her?"

"Murder her," Pegeen said.

While still closely holding Pegeen in front of him, he called across the bar, "Do you need a ride, young lady?"

"Tracy."

"Do you need a ride, Tracy?"

"I've got my car," Tracy replied.

"Are you in any shape to drive it? I can drop
you off at home." Pegeen was still quivering in his arms. She's a cat, he thought, before the cat pounces, the falcon before it soars from the falconer's wrist. The animal you can control—until you let it loose. He thought, I am providing her Tracy the way I give her the clothes. Everyone felt emboldened with Lara because there was no Lara there and so no consequences. This he knew to be different. It dawned on him that he was ceding all the power to Pegeen.

"I can get my husband to pick me up," Tracy said.

He'd noticed earlier that she wore no wedding ring. "No, let us drive you. Where do you want to go?"

Tracy mentioned a town twelve miles to the west.

The bartender, who knew Axler lived in the opposite direction, went about his job as if he were a deaf-mute. Because of Axler's movies, practically everyone in the rural town of nine hundred knew who he was, though few had any idea that his reputation rested on his lifetime's achievement on the stage. The drunken young woman paid her bill and climbed off the stool and grabbed her jacket to
leave. She was taller than he'd imagined and larger, too—a stray perhaps, but no waif—a buxom blond with an extensive body and a kind of ready-made Nordic prettiness. In all, a coarser, commonplace version of stately Louise.

He put Tracy in the back seat with Pegeen and drove them along the dark country roads, empty of traffic, to his house. It was as though they were abducting her. The swiftness with which Pegeen moved did not take him by surprise. She was not constrained by inhibition or fear as she had been when she'd gotten her haircut, and he was already enthralled merely by what he could hear from the back of the car. In the bedroom at home Pegeen emptied onto the bed her plastic bag of implements, among them the toy-like cat-o'-nine-tails with its very soft, thin wisps of black unknotted leather.

A
XLER WONDERED
what was going on in Tracy's mind. She gets into a car with two people she's never seen before, they drive her to a house on a dirt road deep in the country, and then she steps out of the car into a three-ring circus. She may be drunk but she's also young. How oblivious to risk
can she be? Or do Pegeen and I inspire trust? Or is risk what Tracy's looking for? Or is she too drunk to care? He wondered if she had ever done anything like this before. He wondered again why she was doing it now. It didn't make sense that this Tracy should fall into their laps to do all of the Lara-like stuff they'd been dreaming excitedly about in bed. Though what did make sense? His being unable to go out and act on a stage? His having been a psychiatric inpatient? His conducting a love affair with a lesbian whom he'd first seen nursing at her mother's breast?

When a man gets two women together, it is not unusual for one of the women, rightly or wrongly feeling neglected, to wind up crying in a corner of the room. From how this was going so far, it looked as though the one who'd wind up crying in the corner would be him. Yet as he watched from the far side of the bed, he did not feel painfully overlooked. He had let Pegeen appoint herself ringmaster and would not participate until summoned. He would watch without interfering. First Pegeen stepped into the contraption, adjusted and secured the leather straps, and affixed the dildo so that it jutted straight out. Then she crouched above Tracy, brushing Tracy's lips and nipples with her mouth and fondling her breasts, and then she slid down a ways and gently penetrated Tracy with the dildo. Pegeen did not have to force her open. She did not have to say a word—he imagined that if either one of them did begin to speak, it would be in a language unrecognizable to him. The green cock plunged in and out of the abundant naked body sprawled beneath it, slow at first, then faster and harder, then harder still, and all of Tracy's curves and hollows moved in unison with it. This was not soft porn. This was no longer two unclothed women caressing and kissing on a bed. There was something primitive about it now, this woman-on-woman violence, as though, in the room filled with shadows, Pegeen were a magical composite of shaman, acrobat, and animal. It was as if she were wearing a mask on her genitals, a weird totem mask, that made her into what she was not and was not supposed to be. She could as well have been a crow or a coyote, while simultaneously Pegeen Mike. There was something dangerous about it. His heart thumped with excitement—the god Pan looking on from a distance with his spying, lascivious gaze.

It was English that Pegeen spoke when she looked over from where she was, now resting on her back beside Tracy, combing the little black cat-o'-ninetails through Tracy's long hair, and, with that kidlike smile that showed her two front teeth, said to him softly, "Your turn. Defile her." She took Tracy by one shoulder, whispered "Time to change masters," and gently rolled the stranger's large, warm body toward his. "Three children got together," he said, "and decided to put on a play," whereupon his performance began.

A
ROUND MIDNIGHT
they drove Tracy back to the lot beside the inn where she'd left her car.

"You two do this often?" Tracy asked from the back seat, where she lay encircled by Pegeen's arms.

"No," Pegeen said. "Do you?"

"Never in my life."

"So what do you think?" asked Pegeen.

"I can't think. My head's too crammed with everything to think. I feel tripped out. I feel like I've taken drugs."

"Where did you get the bravado for this?" Pegeen asked her. "The booze?"

"Your clothes. The way you looked. I thought, I
have nothing to fear. Tell me, is he that actor?" Tracy asked Pegeen, as though he weren't in the car.

"He is," Pegeen said.

"That's what the bartender said. Are you an actress?" she asked Pegeen.

"Off and on," Pegeen said.

"It was crazy," Tracy said.

"It was," Pegeen replied, the wielder of the cat-o'-nine-tails and connoisseur of the dildo, who was herself no dabbler, who had indeed carried things to the limit.

Tracy kissed Pegeen passionately when they said goodnight. Passionately Pegeen returned the kiss and stroked her hair and clutched her breasts, and in the parking lot beside the inn where they'd all met, the two momentarily clung together. Then Tracy got into her car, and before she drove off, he heard Pegeen tell her, "See you soon."

They drove home with Pegeen's hand down in his pants. "The smell," she said, "it's on us," while Axler thought, I miscalculated—I didn't think it through. He was the god Pan no longer. Far from it.

W
HILE PEGEEN SHOWERED
, he sat downstairs in the kitchen and had a cup of tea as if nothing had
happened, as if another ordinary night had been passed at home. The tea, the cup, the saucer, the sugar, the cream—all answered a need for the matter-of-fact.

"I want to have a child." He imagined Pegeen speaking those words. He imagined her telling him when she came into the kitchen after the shower, "I want to have a child." He was imagining the least likely thing that might happen, which was why he was imagining it; he was out to force his foolhardiness back into a domestic container.

"With whom?" he imagined himself asking her.

"With you. You are the choice of my life."

"As your family has duly warned you, I'm closing in on seventy. When the child is ten I'll be seventy-five, seventy-six. By then I may not be your choice. I'll be in a wheelchair with this spine of mine, if not already dead."

"Forget about my family," he imagined her saying. "I want you to be the father of my child."

"Are you going to keep this a secret from Asa and Carol?"

"No. All that's over. You were right. Louise did me a favor with that phone call. No more secrecy. They'll have to live with things as they are."

"And where did this desire come from to mother a child?"

"From becoming what I've become for you."

He imagined himself saying, "Who could have foreseen this evening taking this turn?"

"Not at all," he imagined Pegeen replying. "It's the next step. If we're to continue, I want three things. I want you to have back surgery. I want you to resume your career. I want you to impregnate me."

"You want a lot."

"Who taught me to want a lot?" he imagined her saying. "That's my proposal for a real life. What more can I offer?"

"Back surgery is very tricky. The doctors I've seen say it would do no good in my case."

"You can't go on locked up with that pain. You can't go on hobbling around forever."

"And my career is trickier still."

"No," he imagined her saying, "it's a matter of adopting a plan to end the uncertainty. A bold long-term plan."

"That's all that's required," he imagined himself answering.

"Yes. It's time to be bold with yourself."

"If anything, it sounds like it's time to be cautious."

But because in her company he had begun to be rejuvenated, because he had done everything in his power to get himself to believe that she who'd begun by offering him a glass of water—only to go from there to pulling off the feat of feats, the sexchange act—could indeed make contentment real with him, he thought the most hopeful thoughts he could. In this kitchen reverie of the rectified life he imagined himself seeing an orthopedist who sent him for an MRI and after that for a presurgical myelogram and after that for surgery. Meanwhile he would have contacted Jerry Oppenheim and told him that if anyone wanted to offer him a role, he was available to work again. Then, still at the kitchen table exciting himself by elaborating these thoughts while Pegeen finished showering upstairs, he imagined Pegeen having a healthy baby the very month that he opened at the Guthrie Theater in the role of James Tyrone. He would have found Vincent Daniels's card where he had left it as a bookmark in the copy of
Long Day's Journey.
He would have gone to see Vincent Daniels with the script and they would have worked together every day until they found the way to get him to stop distrusting himself, so that when he went onstage at the Guthrie on opening night, the lost magic returned, and he knew while the words were flying so naturally, so effortlessly out of his mouth that he was in the midst of a performance as good as any he had ever given and that maybe being incapacitated for so long, however painful, hadn't been the worst thing that could have happened. Now the audience believed him anew in every moment. Where, previously, confronting the scariest part of acting—the line, saying something, saying something spontaneously with freedom and ease—he had felt himself naked, without the protection of any approach, now everything was once again emanating from instinct and he needed no other means of approach. The stretch of bad luck was over. The self-inflicted torment was over. He had recovered his confidence, the grief was displaced, the abominable fear was dispelled, and everything that had fled him was back where it belonged. The reconstruction of a life had to begin somewhere, and for him it had started with falling for Pegeen Stapleford, amazingly just the woman to have recruited for the job.

It seemed to him now that the kitchen scenario
was no longer the aery tale with which he'd begun but that he was imagining a new possibility, a reclamation of exuberance that it was his intention to fight for and to implement and to enjoy. Axler felt the determination that was originally his when he came to New York to audition at the age of twenty-two.

T
HE NEXT MORNING
, as soon as Pegeen had left to drive back to Vermont, he called a hospital in New York and asked for a doctor with whom he could consult about the genetic hazards of fathering a child at sixty-five. He was referred to the office of a specialist and given an appointment for the following week. He said nothing about any of this to Pegeen.

The hospital was far uptown, and after parking the car in a garage, he made his way with mounting excitement to the doctor's office. He was given the usual medical forms to fill out and then greeted by a Filipino man of about thirty-five who said he was Dr. Wan's assistant. There was a windowed room off the waiting area, and the assistant led him there so that they could be alone. It seemed a room designed to be used by children, with low tables and small chairs scattered about and children's drawings pinned to one wall. The two of them sat at one of the tables and the assistant began to ask him about himself and his family and the diseases they had suffered from and the diseases they had died of. The doctor's assistant recorded the answers on a sheet of paper printed with the skeleton of a family tree. Axler told him as much as he knew from as far back as his knowledge of the family extended. Then the assistant took a second sheet and asked about the family of the prospective mother. Axler could tell him only that Pegeen's parents were both living; he knew nothing about their medical histories or those of Pegeen's aunts, uncles, grandparents, and great-grandparents. The assistant asked for her family's country of origin, as he had asked for Axler's, and, having recorded the information, told Axler that he would give all the data to Dr. Wan and that after he and the doctor had conferred, she would come out to talk to Axler.