Valerie Martin Read online

  There was nothing especially intelligent or innovative about my own performance, though everyone, including the local press, praised it as if they’d never seen my equal. My teachers gushed with enthusiasm; my director, a voluptuous graduate student, fell in love with me, and we had a brief affair. I knew I was feeling my way, that my insecurity was part of what made my prince Hamlet so appealing. I was, as he was, a youth, a student, and I had lost a parent in suspicious circumstances. It was during those rehearsals that I first allowed myself the thought that my mother’s death was a crime against me, me personally. I could see Helen’s angry sneer as she slapped the pages of her magazine against the table while Mother encouraged me to study medicine, and her bitter denouncement of the amity between us rang in my ears. “I hate this part of you.” One night I woke from panicked dreams with the idea that I must find Helen and make her pay for what she had done to me. Then, sweating and cursing in my narrow dorm bed, I remembered that she had denied me that option. My lines came to me and I whispered them into the darkness: That I, the son of a dear father murder’d, Prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell, Must, like a whore, unpack my heart with words, And fall a-cursing, like a very drab. I wept, not for Hamlet, who lived just long enough to avenge his father’s murder, but for myself.

  Part II

  I’ll jump ahead to a sultry morning in July 1974. College was behind me. I was in my tiny Greenwich Village apartment packing my battered suitcase, the same suitcase I took to North Carolina when I was nineteen, the same one I carried when I arrived at Penn Station four years after that, ambitious, confident, and ignorant as a post. I experienced a pang of anxiety as I held up my swimming trunks, worn and venerable as my suitcase and woefully out of style, but there was nothing to be done about them—my ride was arriving within the hour—so I tossed them in with the rest, the T-shirts, the cutoff jeans, my Dopp kit, the gray linen jacket with the Italian label that I’d gotten secondhand, the madras shirt, the oversize belt, the black dress jeans. I snapped the top down and went into the bathroom, where I stood before the mirror, combing my hair.

  Stanislavski described such a moment, a man combing his hair before a mirror, as one of perfect naturalness and ease, and therefore poetic; for him it epitomized “truth,” which was the condition an actor must discover in performance. He called it “public solitude,” the notion being, I supposed, that we are most “ourselves” when we don’t have an audience. I smiled at my face in the mirror, recognizing that smile, the one I trusted as no other, which seems odd to me now because at the time I knew nothing about that smiling young man combing his hair; he was as opaque as a clay jug. Soon I would be on the Jersey shore in my outmoded trunks and madras shirt, and with any luck I’d have my arm around the waist of Madeleine Delavergne. Would that waist be bare? Would Madeleine sport a one-piece suit, or a bikini? Was such a thing as a bikini possible on the Jersey shore?

  There would be eight of us, all acting students, though we didn’t attend the same schools. Madeleine and I were students in Sanford Meisner’s professional program at his studio on Fifty-sixth Street, but Teddy Winterbottom, he of the Yale degree and the large Victorian beach house, studied with the great Stella Adler. I had become acquainted with Teddy over a lot of beer at the Cedar Tavern, and though I’d never seen him act, he was a wonderful raconteur and general purveyor of bonhomie. His family was traveling abroad, and we would have the house to ourselves for the holiday weekend. There were, Teddy promised, eight beds, one for each dwarf, and one more for him.

  I heard the blare of Teddy’s horn from the street and crossed my narrow living room to wave out the open window. He drove an MG convertible; the top was down, so he saw me and waved back. My long legs weren’t designed for a sports car; it would be a tedious, hot, uncomfortable drive, but I couldn’t have cared less. I snatched my suitcase from the table and, pausing only to turn the dead bolt, rushed down the four dusty flights of stairs into the street. My poetic moment before the mirror left my mind entirely.

  As it turned out, the house wasn’t on the beach, but it was scarcely a block away. Like its neighbors, it was large, airy, swaddled with deep porches, shingled over, and trimmed with decorative flourishes. Red was the predominating color, the shingles a sun-faded rose, the wide-board floors gleaming cadmium, with touches of red in the furnishings, a pillow here, a slipcover there. Teddy and I spent an hour or so opening windows, plugging in appliances, distributing linens to the various bedrooms and cushions to the wicker couches on the porches. By the time he announced his intention to leave me in charge while he ran out to the grocery for provisions, I was acquainted with the house from cellar to attic. “Put Becky and James in the room with the double bed,” he said. “And tell the rest it’s first come, first served.”

  He wasn’t gone long when Madeleine and her friend Mindy Banks pulled up at the curb in a rusty Dodge crammed with groceries, suitcases, and a miserable dachshund named Lawrence, who hit the ground with a grunt, trotted to a poor stripling of a tree near the curb, and peed mightily. “I’m with Lawrence,” Madeleine exclaimed, bounding past me up the stairs. “Where’s the john?”

  We had met before, casually, in class and at Jimmy Ray’s bar, always in a crowd. Aspiring actresses are often damaged, neurotic girls but Madeleine struck me as unusually stable and confident. She had masses of wavy black hair, pale skin, hazel eyes, full pouting lips, and enviable cheekbones. Her only physical flaw was her hips, which were a little wide.

  “There’s one just off the upstairs landing,” I called after her. “On your left.”

  “Thanks,” she said, not looking back. Lawrence left off the tree and fell to sniffing my pants leg. Mindy came up carrying a grocery bag, which she handed to me. “You’re Ed, aren’t you?” she said. “We met one time at Teddy’s.”

  By dinner everyone had arrived except Peter Davis, who was bringing a friend no one knew. “Some guy who lives in a rathole in Chelsea,” Teddy said. “He’s only been in town a few months. He works in the bookstore with Peter, doesn’t seem to have any friends or family. Peter said he felt sorry for him, so I said bring him along.”

  I didn’t like the sound of this, especially as we had far too many males in our group already. I was making good headway in my campaign for Madeleine’s attention, and I didn’t want her distracted. In the afternoon, I’d persuaded her to walk with me on the beach, and I’d served as her sous-chef at dinner. The food was awful, vegetarian fare—this was before the soybean had been tamed, and good bread was only to be had in dreary co-op food stores. Salad was romaine lettuce at best, mesclun was as rare as diamonds, arugula as yet unheard of on our planet. But we had cases of beer and cheap wine, various small stashes of marijuana, and a freezer full of ice cream, so we were enjoying ourselves. As the sun went down, the breeze off the ocean cooled from torrid to sultry and we moved from the dining room to the wide screened-in porch. The talk was all of theater, who was doing what plays where, who had the best deal on head shots, the relative merits of acting teachers and schools, the catch-22 of Actors’ Equity, the anxieties, perils, and hilarious adventures of those who had appeared nude onstage. Madeleine had chosen a wicker chair near mine. On our walk she had told me of her recent breakup with a boyfriend of some duration; they had lived together in an apartment on West Forty-seventh for more than a year. She made light of the matter; the boyfriend was a slob who ate bacon-and-peanut-butter sandwiches and didn’t wash the pan, left his clothes on the floor, always managed to leave a smear of toothpaste on the sink drain. The end came when she returned from a weekend visit to her parents in Cleveland to find he’d let the bathtub overflow and the downstairs neighbors had called the landlord because the water was pouring down their kitchen wall. “He was working on his play and he forgot he’d turned on the tap,” she said.

  “He’s a playwright.”

  “His plays are awful,” she said. “He’s writing a play about Simón Bolívar, for God’s sake.”

  Madeleine was beautiful, she ma
de me laugh, and she was evidently available: I was rhapsodic. My quandary was how to get her away from the others. The sleeping arrangements weren’t ideal, she and Mindy had chosen adjoining rooms, and I wasn’t entirely clear about the etiquette of house parties. I didn’t want to do anything that would offend Teddy, but fortunately he was absorbed in entertaining Mindy, who had a laugh like a braying mule. She was curvy and blowsy, crude, I thought, and given to bursts of Broadway tunes, as if she saw a producer lurking in the rhododendrons pressing against the screen. Madeleine smiled at me through the wistful refrain of “Send in the Clowns.” “I want to swim,” she said. “Will you come with me?”

  “Of course,” I said.

  My feelings were mixed. It was a chance to be alone with her in a romantic setting, which was enticing to say the least. The famous still of Deborah Kerr and Burt Lancaster in a clutch on the beach in From Here to Eternity flashed before my eyes, but that was in Hawaii and in broad daylight (or was it what is called in film “day for night”?). The waters in Jersey were rumored to contain jellyfish—would they be worse at night? Then there was the matter of the unflattering swimming trunks, and the sad fact that my swimming skills were much inferior to Burt’s. But none of this weighed more than a feather in a balance that contained Madeleine in a swimsuit at night on a beach under the moon. “I’ll change,” she said, leaping up from her chair. “I’ll just be a minute.” As she passed through the doors to the dining room I noticed a wobble in her step; she pressed her shoulder against the frame and pushed on. Was she drunk? Was I? In answer to the second question I got to my feet. No, I was exhilarated, on the up not the down side of inebriation, and a stroll in the night air might be just the thing. I hastened to my room, changed into a T-shirt and the trunks, grabbed a towel from the stack on the dresser, and went out to the hall, where I found Madeleine floating toward me in a fetching costume, a two-piece suit with a tie-dyed shawl fastened at the waist to make a loose, fluttering skirt. “This is great,” she said. “I love swimming at night.”

  “Me too,” I lied. I followed her down the stairs to the front porch where we culled our sandals from the herd along the rail and flapped out to the sidewalk. The voices of our friends drifted to us, punctuated with laughter. The house next door, blazing light from every window, gave off a mouthwatering aroma of grilling meat. Overhead the sky was clear and black; the air vibrated with the salty exhalations of the ocean. “It’s nice here,” Madeleine said. “I’m glad I came. The city is a furnace.”

  “I’m glad you came too,” I said. We reached the corner, crossed the empty street, and there was the sea, black roiling under black, restless and ceaseless, combing the shore. We clattered down the wooden steps and sloughed off our sandals in the sand. Madeleine untied her skirt, dropping it over the shoes, careless in her excitement. “It’s beautiful,” she said. “And there’s no one here.” She rushed away from me to the water’s edge. I tossed my towel and shirt on the pile and followed. The half-moon cast a cool light that was reflected from the sand, but the dark waves sucked it up and gave back nothing. Madeleine was already waist deep in the surf, walking steadily away from me. I pounded across the sand and into the water, which was cold against my hot skin, a startling, welcome embrace. She turned to me and, as I drew closer, batted the surface of the water gleefully. “Look,” she said. “It’s magic.”

  And it was. Strips of green light darted away from her fingertips like bright snakes, and the harder she slapped the water the more there were. “It’s phosphorescence,” I said.

  “No, no,” she protested. “It’s magic.” Just then the cosmic magician called up a wave, banishing the snakes and tipping Madeleine into my arms. “You’re right,” I said, pulling her up against my chest. We kissed.

  How many kisses do you remember all your life? Four or five, I think, not many. Even at that moment I knew this was one I wouldn’t forget, and I was right.

  We swam and kissed and swam again, enchanted by the green light attendant on our every movement. Madeleine was at ease in the water and completely fearless, a much better swimmer than I was. She swam underneath me and came up ahead of me. We floated on our backs holding hands, letting the waves carry us to shore. We embraced in the sand, then struck back out in tandem. It was foreplay with ocean, and we extended it as long as we could bear it. We treaded water while kissing, and she wrapped her legs around my waist. At some point her suit top slipped down. To her amusement my erection strained the confines of the trunks. We spoke very little until, at last, by some visceral agreement, we scrambled onto the shore and raced back to the staircase, beneath which we laid out the towel and her skirt, stripped off our minimal coverings, and amid sighs and cries muffled by the steady rumbling of the tide, finished what we had started.

  When it was over I rolled off of Madeleine, light-headed, my heart churning in my chest. She chuckled softly and rested her hand on my sandy thigh. “So, you’re Edward Day,” she said.

  “Am I?” I replied. “Are you sure?”

  “That’s what I’ve heard,” she said. She was feeling about for her suit. “I don’t like to think of some of the places I’ve got sand in,” she said. We took one last dip in the surf to rinse off. Then she shook out her wrap and tied it at her waist. I pulled on my T-shirt; we slipped on our sandals and climbed the stairs to the dimly lit street. A car passed; we could hear voices from the balconies facing the shore, but they were soft now; it was late. I took Madeleine’s hand as we crossed the street, and she slipped her arm beneath mine, leaning against me. “It’s as if we’d been in another world,” she said.

  “It is,” I agreed.

  “Will we go there again?”

  “God, I hope so,” I said.

  “At any rate, we’ll never forget it.”

  We had reached Teddy’s house. Some of the lights in the upstairs bedrooms were on. A flicker of candlelight and more soft humming of voices came from the side porch, but no one was in the darkened foyer. “Should we join them?” I asked. She pressed her lips together and raised her eyebrows. We said “No” together. “I’m too tired,” she added. “I know I’m going to sleep well tonight. There’s no exercise like swimming, don’t you agree.” I laughed. She rose up on her toes to kiss me. “Good night, Edward,” she said.

  “You can call me Ed,” I said.

  “I like Edward better.” With that she left me, climbing the stairs with one hand on the rail, her shoulders drooping like a weary child. I watched her go up, but, certain I wasn’t going to sleep anytime soon, I didn’t follow.

  I know the cliché. Post coitum omne animal triste est. The man rolls over and falls asleep, the woman lies awake wondering why he won’t marry her if he hasn’t already or if he has, whether she should divorce him. Maybe it was like that for the Romans, but I’ve never been able to fall asleep after sex. I was elated by our adventure and restless. From the porch I could hear the idle chatter of our friends, doubtless smoking pot and gossiping about Madeleine and me. I heard Teddy’s hearty guffaw, joined by a thin, mirthless laugh I didn’t recognize; Peter Davis and his luckless friend must have arrived. I was in no mood to meet anyone, especially an actor with a laugh like that. I slipped back onto the front porch, careful to close the screen soundlessly, picked up my sandals and carried them with me to the sidewalk. Madeleine and I had seen a fishing pier on our walk earlier in the day, the entrance flanked by an ice-cream truck and a bike-rental concession. It had been crowded with bathers and children strolling about and shouting for the sheer joy of having escaped the city and arrived at the shore. By now, I thought, it would be quiet and empty; a good place for a late-night stroll and one last colloquy with the sea and stars before attempting sleep in the single bed down the hall from the dreaming Madeleine. Would she dream of me? How would it be in the morning when we met in the kitchen with the others; would she want too much from me by way of acknowledgment, or too little? Would our comrades have marked our absence and tease us, or would they be indifferent, distracted by thei
r own erotic campaigns? Had I seduced Madeleine, or had she taken advantage of me because I was the most attractive, available male? Wasn’t there, beneath my enthusiasm and satisfaction about what had happened on the beach, a glimmer of contempt for her? I certainly wanted to have sex with her again, but the desire I felt for her had already lost its edge. A comfortable, familiar smugness took its place. As I walked though the eerily quiet town, with its closed-up shops shedding blobs of unnatural fluorescent light onto the sidewalk, I delved into every nuance of my emotions, ambling about in search of the conjunction between the mental and the physical. An actor’s emotions are his textbook. I perceived that my forehead was tight, my upper lip stretched down and pursed slightly over my lower lip. Who am I? I asked. I cast my eyes to the right and left, letting my head follow. I practiced Brando, that slow, overheated appraisal of the scene he’s about to disrupt, following his prick, the wolf on the prowl for a mate.

  I had reached the street ending at the pier. To my disappointment, a man and a woman lingered near the bike rental, deep in conversation. As I approached, they moved off, not touching, still talking. She walked, like royalty, ahead of him. I slowed my pace, waiting until I couldn’t hear their footsteps. When I got to the corner, they were gone.

  There was a lamp near the stairs to the pier, but its light didn’t reach past the first few planks, and as I stepped outside its influence I had the sensation that the volume on the ocean soundtrack had been turned up. The tide was high; the water broke more forcefully against the lumber of the pier than it had against the shore, with a steady thwack and suck that sounded like slow-motion sex. I thought it might be pleasant to smoke a cigarette—get in on the sucking action. I’d left a pack on the side porch which had promptly become public property and was, by now, surely empty. I thought of my friends—I didn’t know any of them well, even Teddy was something of a mystery to me, but our shared passion for the theater, for a life illuminated by floodlights, enacted for the benefit of strangers, made us not a family but a tribe. If we were successful the ordinary world would be closed to us, and if we failed, well, it would still be closed, but in a less agreeable way. So we watched one another, affably enough, to see who would make his way and who fall by the wayside. I had a good feeling about Madeleine; I thought she would succeed, and I knew it was largely this apprehension that made her attractive to me. “Madeleine,” I said to the saturated air. I sniffed my fingers, but there was no trace of her; the sea had washed her scent away.