Valerie Martin Read online

  Peter Davis came in first, resplendent in paisley swimming trunks, a bright-yellow towel draped around his neck. He greeted me, holding out his hand for a manly shake. “Ed,” he said, “really glad you’re still with us.” Becky and Mindy followed, interrupting their conversation to gush over me. They amused themselves with an exaggerated display of hugs and kisses. “I’m fine,” I assured them. “I’m fine.” Over their sun-burnished, brine-scented shoulders I saw Madeleine and Guy pause in the doorway to take in the spectacle. Their bodies inclined toward each other. Madeleine’s droll expression suggested that Guy had just said something entertaining and he had the smug look of a man relishing his own wit. Was there a joke between them? Was it at my expense? My tongue probed my teeth in a hopeless quest for words. The dithering girls released me and alighted on Teddy, who announced that he was taking orders at the stove. Madeleine approached without speaking. Tenderly, she laid her palm along my check and dropped a chaste kiss on my forehead. “You should have gone to bed when I did,” she said softly.

  I turned my face into her hand, closing my eyes against the humid web of her fingers and kissing the soft pad at the base of her thumb. It came over me that, along with everything else, I had come close to losing her, and losing her before I could say with any confidence that I had found her. We’d had an intimate yet brief encounter, but now the benignity of her touch, the gentleness of her reproach called up in me an emotion so pure and deep it shook me to my core. As an actor, it is my vocation to reproduce such feelings at will, and in fact that moment has stayed with me all these years, and when I am called upon to find, for the benefit of an audience, the outward expression of inconsolable sadness and loss, I feel my eyes closing and my face turning into the warmth of Madeleine’s hand.

  It was a public caress, noted without comment by a lively group intent on pleasure. My desolation was off-key, out of tune, too intense for the company, and I let it go as quickly as it had come. So did Madeleine. Briefly she pressed her palm against my lips, a subtle pressure no one else could see, and then she withdrew her hand and offered her services to the chef, who, having insufficiently separated the bacon strips, was dodging and cursing over a viciously sputtering lump of fat. Wistfully I regarded her back; when would we be alone again, how would we manage it? I sensed a movement behind me, a shadow flickered across Teddy’s folded newspaper, the chair across from me gave a muffled shriek as it was dragged back from the table, and Guy Margate dropped into place before me.

  I don’t deny that, superficially at least, Guy looked a lot like me. We were both tall and lean, our eyes deep set, and our beakish noses jutted from the eyebrow line. We were a type; in a casting call, we were the handsome white guys. But Guy was darker than I, his hair black and straight, his eyes a deep chocolate brown. He could do an Italian, or a Latino, even an Indian at a stretch. My looks are more startling because my hair is wavy and I have light eyes. I can turn the atmosphere on a stage to ice with a sudden glance.

  Guy must have envied me my eyes. He had to withhold something to cool things down, something overheated and demonic. Personally I think it’s difficult for anyone with brown eyes to do a real chill. Brando could scare the life out of you, but if he turned a cold shoulder it wasn’t distance, it was a death warrant, it was violence. His cold shoulder was hot. Pacino does restraint well—same effect—he’s just decided not to tear your head off right this second. Jeremy Irons is an exception; he has brown eyes, but he can do a prodigious chill. That’s because he’s got Britishness, which is the definition of cool on a stage; also he’s slight of build, and he has a quality of longing combined with deep boredom—that’s the Britishness again. You know he’d give anything to be human, to have a real feeling, but he’s just not going to get there because he’s dead, actually, and you forgive him for that. For me, Irons epitomizes what I call “the remove.”

  So, although Guy was giving me what anybody else would have characterized as a cold look over the kitchen table, my perception was that he didn’t do it very well. I could do it better and for a moment I did. I smiled slightly, I allowed my eyes to rest on his face, not meeting his eyes, and I waited for him to speak.

  I know what you’re thinking—what kind of ingrate is this? Here he’s reencountering the man who saved his life not ten hours earlier and all he’s thinking about is who’s the better actor. Well, perhaps you’re right, but remember, Guy Margate had seen me at my most desperate. I had clung to him in panic, lost consciousness from exhaustion and fear; on the shore I had retched into the sand at his feet. Thanks to him it was understood by my friends, and especially by the woman I most desired, that my plight had been largely the result of my ignorance. Any competent swimmer could have saved himself. As every actor knows, emotions succeed each other in sequences that are often inappropriate and counterintuitive—this is what polite society was created to conceal—but one sequence that rarely, if ever, obtains is for humiliation to be followed by gratitude. If politicians could only grasp this simple precept, the world would be a much more peaceful place. I knew by all rights that I should feel grateful to Guy Margate for saving my life, but what I felt was not gratitude. I felt wary of him, but I was prepared to present him with a reasonable facsimile of the proper emotion.

  “How are you?” he said at last.

  Now how did he say it? That’s important. Did warmth and solicitude pour from his eye, did his tone betray more than ordinary interest in the answer to his question? No and no. His interest was distant, his voice flat.

  “I’m fine,” I said.

  “You don’t look fine,” he observed.

  Oh, all right, I thought, all right. “I’m glad to be alive,” I said. “Thanks to you.”

  He smiled. He had long canines and a wolfish grin, very sudden and over before you knew it. “My pleasure,” he said.

  Then an unpleasant thing happened. Madeleine approached with a mug. As she leaned over his back, the top of her chest pressed into his shoulder. “Here’s your coffee,” she said, setting the mug before him. He brought his hand up and touched the inside of her elbow. “Thanks, dear,” he said.

  “You’re welcome,” Madeleine sweetly replied, turning back to the stove. Guy lifted his eyes to mine, as my heart sank. “She’s lovely, isn’t she?” he said.

  The rest of the weekend was torture to me, though it ended well enough. After lunch everyone but Teddy went back to the beach and I tagged along. It was agreed that I must get back in the water, just as a fallen rider is advised to get back on a horse, no matter how damaged or reluctant he feels or how blatantly vicious and unruly the animal might actually be. I wasn’t unwilling; I even felt some crude masculine urge to prove myself, especially to Madeleine, but when I stood on the sand looking out at the fathomless depths, I felt my throat closing around a solid lump of panic. The beach was crowded; all manner of people were thrashing about in the water: oldsters, pubescent girls, pregnant women, children were in it, babies were being dunked in it or toddling about in the shallows. I wanted to cry out, Run for your lives! Swimming struck me as a species of madness; one might as well try to ride a tiger or leap into a vat of poisonous snakes. My friends, unaware of my stark terror, encouraged me, all but Guy Margate, who strode out into the shallows, dived into an incoming wave, and beelined at motor-boat speed out past the breakers, where he bobbed like a cork gazing back at the shore. Madeleine and Mindy chortled over his prowess, reminding me, as if I needed reminding, what a bit of luck it was for me that I had managed to nearly drown within range of such a man. Drowning began to look good. I swallowed my fear and walked into the swirling waters, noting that even close to shore you can feel the pull of the tide, its willingness to take you down. Peter Davis caught up with me and we chatted as the sand declined beneath my feet and the water gripped my waist. “How long have you known Guy?” I asked him.

  “A few months. He’s only been in town since February.”

  “Where’s he from?”

  “I don’t know. One of t
hose states in the middle. Iowa, Ohio, something like that. Kansas, maybe.”

  “He didn’t learn to swim in Kansas,” I said.

  “No? Don’t they have lakes?”

  I shoved off into a wave and Peter followed. It was OK, I could stand it. I wasn’t going to drown with this many people around and the ocean was doing a gently pulsing, I’m-not-scary routine, which I now understood to be the equivalent of entrapment. We swam along, parallel to the shore, stopping to tread a bit and look for our crowd. I saw Madeleine swimming out strongly, rising upon a billow and disappearing briefly behind it. She was heading for Guy, who watched her approach, treading so effortlessly that he appeared to be sitting on a chair just beneath the surface of the water. In another moment Madeleine was next to him. They looked like two seals in their element, barking cheerfully at each other.

  What if Madeleine had saved me, I thought. She was certainly a strong enough swimmer. Then I would owe my life to her: Would that really be desirable? I could deny her nothing and she might look upon me with pity. At best her feelings would be maternal. No, I wouldn’t like that at all. “I’m going in,” Peter said.

  “I’m with you,” I said. It was an easy return; we hadn’t gone out very far. My feet found the bottom and I stood up feeling I’d vindicated myself somewhat, at least in my own estimation. Mindy was on a blanket rubbing lotion into her thighs, squinting at the sea. She spotted Peter and me and waved encouragingly.

  “Teddy’s sick for her,” Peter observed. “I don’t see it myself.”

  “She’s sweet,” I said. We arrived at the blanket and threw ourselves down on the sand. When we were dry and broiling in the sun, Guy and Madeleine emerged from the sea and ran up the beach to accost us, shaking off water and wringing their hair over us, playful as puppies. Pretending to be excited by the madcap jollity of it all, I caught Madeleine’s ankle and pulled her down on the sand. She shouted as I play-bit her calf, but she wouldn’t tussle; she was on her feet in an instant, kicking sand in my face. Mindy caught some of it and complained. “It’s too hot for that,” she said. “Let’s get ice cream.” Madeleine, playing the petulant child, whined, “Yes, yes, I want ice cream,” so there was nothing for it but to pull up the blanket and set off for the ice-cream emporium. Madeleine and Mindy led the way, chattering nonstop while Peter, Guy, and I crowded along behind on the sidewalk. The rest of the day went like that, Mindy and Madeleine were inseparable, as if they’d made a pact, and I wondered if, in fact, they had. At the house Teddy was loading a cooler with beer. We started drinking by four. Becky and James, our resident lovers, smooched in the shadows on a big chaise lounge while the rest of us milled about aimlessly, smoking, drinking, doing shower rotations to cool down. Even on the porch with the ceiling fan running, it was hot. I switched from beer to vodka and cranberry which only made me more irritable. Mindy put on some mix tapes she’d brought with her, one dreadful Broadway show tune after another. No one seemed to mind, even when she joined in on the chorus. Teddy, desperate to separate her from Madeleine, engaged her in a teasing version of “Cabaret,” followed by a faux-tango to “Hernando’s Hideaway.” I took the opportunity to steal Mindy’s seat next to Madeleine. Teddy whirled Mindy this way and that, a suave and confident dancer. “Teddy’s a revelation,” I said to Madeleine. She gave me the blandest of smiles. Guy, watching the show from the dining-room doorway called out “Olé!,” his eyebrows lifted and his lips pursed, thwacking his palms together in the approved flamenco style, a parody of the excitable Latino male. Madeleine laughed. Their eyes met across the room; something sly and charged in the exchange put me over the top. “Come dance with me,” I commanded Madeleine, grasping her wrist. I lurched to my feet but she resisted, throwing me off balance. I still had my drink in hand and I stumbled a few steps, trying to keep it from spilling over. I heard Guy say, “Oh, señor, be careful.” Teddy was twirling Mindy in my direction as she sang the required knock code and password to give at the door of the hideaway. We collided. I poured my drink neatly down the front of her blouse. “Joe!” Mindy exclaimed. The music stopped.

  “Well done, Ed,” Guy said.

  I looked back to see Madeleine frowning at me in a way I didn’t like. Mindy, ever good-natured, only laughed. She plucked an ice cube from her bodice. “Very cooling,” she observed.

  “I’m so sorry, Mindy,” I said. “Please forgive me.”

  “Don’t be silly,” she said.

  I put my arm around her waist and led her toward the kitchen. “Let’s clean you up,” I said. “Let me help you out of that top.”

  “Teddy,” she cried joyfully. “Ed wants to take off my top.”

  “That’s a job for two men,” Teddy said, enfolding her from the other side and we propelled her to the kitchen where we did get her blouse off and made a show of washing it in the sink while she poured herself a glass of wine and stood watching us in her black lace bra. Cleverly Teddy sent me to the basement for some detergent. When I came back, he and Mindy were in a clutch against the refrigerator. I ducked back onto the porch to find only the lovers and Peter Davis, who was playing solitaire at a low table he’d pulled up between his knees.

  “Where’d they go?” I asked.

  “They went for a walk.”

  “Damn,” I said and Peter chuckled over his cards.

  “I’m losing too,” he said, “against myself.”

  I sat on the porch steps looking up and down the sidewalk but there was no one in sight. I was thinking about Guy’s Latino impression, which had been so successful with Madeleine, and of how disarming is the ability to make people laugh. It’s a gift, mimicry, but it’s not acting; in a way it’s the opposite of acting, which is why comedians are seldom good actors. There’s an element of exaggeration in the imposture; the copy is the original painted with a broad brush and it can be grotesque, even cruel. But no one is offended. People are drawn to the funnyman who can imitate a politician or a famous actor or an ethnic type, especially his own ethnic type.

  Guy was an excellent mimic. He could pick up the voice, accent, posture, inflection, facial tics, laugh, walk, and conversational manner of anyone he studied for a few minutes. He had the requisite deadpan, the refusal to enter the joke, but it wasn’t willful. He was not one of the clowns derided by Hamlet that will themselves laugh, to set on some quantity of barren spectators to laugh too. Though he could mock those who did, Guy simply had no sense of humor. “Barren spectators,” I thought. That was good.

  So by disdaining a skill I don’t possess, I got my mind off my present predicament and made myself feel superior to the competition, a serviceable gambit rendered worthless when at last Guy and Madeleine came into view. They didn’t see me and I was free to study their approach. They weren’t touching, which was a relief, but they were talking, or rather Madeleine was talking and Guy was listening closely, nodding his head as if he was taking instruction. At last he spoke and Madeleine, glancing ahead, noticed me on the steps. I raised my hand in humble, hopeful greeting. To my relief, she smiled. As they turned up the walk, they fell silent. When she was very close, Madeleine said, “Did you get Mindy’s blouse off, Ed?”

  “That was just a joke,” I said.

  “Was it?” she replied. “I wonder why it wasn’t funny.” She passed me, her flip-flops snapping out a brisk staccato of dismissal, concluding in a sharp rap from the closing screen door. Guy came up the steps and sat down beside me.

  “Things aren’t going very well for you, are they?” he observed.

  “I wouldn’t say that,” I said. “She’s obviously jealous; how bad could that be.”

  “That’s a very positive way of looking at it,” he said.

  “You’ll find I’m a very positive sort of guy, Guy.”

  “Unfortunately that’s not always enough.”

  I took this cryptic observation as my exit cue and got to my feet, looking down at Guy’s bowed head. As if addressing his knees he said, “I find myself in financial straits.”

 
; The sagacity of hindsight makes me think I apprehended something ominous in this remark, that it contained an element of moral challenge, one I sensed I might fail to meet. Perhaps I had no such trepidations, but I didn’t move away and the air was oddly still, as if listening for my response.

  “It’s the actor’s chronic condition,” I offered.

  “I thought you might want to help me out.” He didn’t say the rest of it, but I heard it loud and clear—because I saved your life. I heard it and I knew it was true. My life, the air moving in and out of my lungs, the blood coursing through my veins, the thoughts hurtling like traffic in the precincts of my skull, the emotions which at that moment were a rush of contradictory impulses, one of which was resentment, another, the consciousness of boundless obligation, everything I knew and cherished about myself was standing on that porch looking down on the person who, by a selfless effort, had made my standing there, breathing, feeling trapped and resentful, possible. If he had not jumped in to save me, I would have drowned. I couldn’t deny it; I owed him my life and my obligation was a bond that must endure between us forever.

  But it didn’t make me like him. “How much do you need?” I said.

  “Fifty bucks would do it for now.”

  Fifty dollars, at that time, was a fair amount of money. It was half my rent. I had that much in my bank account, but not a lot more.

  “I didn’t bring my checkbook,” I said. “Can you wait until we get back to town?”

  “Sure,” he said. “Monday?”

  “After work. I could meet you at Phebe’s. Bowery and Third, you know it?”

  “I can find it. What time?”

  “Make it seven.”

  “I’ll be there,” he said.

  Immediately I was annoyed with myself for inviting him to my favorite dive instead of choosing some impersonal, public place like Washington Square. If I just handed him the money and walked away, there could be no assumption of friendly feeling, which it seemed important to keep at a minimum. The hostility between us was not, I was convinced, all coming from me; Guy had been contemptuous of me even when I was drowning. He had called my struggle with death a “performance.” Obviously shame was a large component of my feeling about the entire episode; if I could have arranged never to see his face again—with no harm to either of us—I would have done it. At the moment, all I could do was continue on my course back into Teddy’s house. I went up the stairs, closed the door of my bedroom, and stretched out on the bed. I didn’t want to talk to anyone.