Valerie Martin Read online

  “He’s got no subtlety,” I said to Madeleine after the show. We were drinking beer at Jimmy Ray’s on Eighth Street. “There’s nothing going on underneath. If the guy’s a dick, that’s fine, but there’s got to be something behind that, I mean, there’s a reason he’s a dick. It didn’t just happen; he wasn’t fucking born a dick.”

  “What did you think of his dick?” Madeleine asked.

  “That’s an incredibly crude thing to say,” I snapped.

  She laughed. “It just seems to be on your mind.”

  “Frankly, I was too aggravated by his acting to notice, but I’m sure you have an informed opinion.”

  “I didn’t think his acting was that bad. It’s not a great part, but he made the best of it.”

  “Oh please,” I begged.

  The play got two reviews and the critics agreed with Madeleine. One called Guy’s performance “stalwart,” the other said he’d attacked a difficult role with “brio.”

  “If the audience is conscious that the actor is attacking his character,” I told Madeleine, “it’s all over, it’s a failed performance.”

  “You need to get over your envy of Guy,” she replied. “It’s not very attractive.”

  Of course everyone was talking about Guy’s success; you couldn’t go out for a burger without hearing about his latest coup. The reviews resulted in the acquisition of an enthusiastic agent and a callback for a play at the Public and another at St. Mark’s Theater. Christopher Walken beat him out for the part at the Public, but who could complain about being bested by Christopher Walken, etc. The Italian thing ran for its allotted stretch during which time Madeleine and I began our own rehearsals, so I didn’t actually see Guy for several weeks. Then, one night, Teddy invited a few friends to his apartment for drinks and there he was, the new, improved, Equityed and agented Guy Margate, lounging in an armchair before a nonfunctional fireplace with a glass of Teddy’s good Scotch and a pretty, rabbity blonde leaning over him to give him the benefit of her cleavage. Madeleine and Mindy went into a giggling clutch at the door. “Who’s the blonde?” I asked Teddy.

  “She was in the play, the sister. Or was it the girlfriend?” Teddy said. “Her name is Sandy. Sandy something.”

  Sandy was laughing and Guy watched her with that peculiar avidity he had, the dead gazing upon the living. His shoulders were bigger than I recalled; he must have been lifting weights. He was unshaven, his hair unkempt. Was he going for an Italian-stallion look? He lifted the Scotch to his lips and his gaze, surveying the room, settled on me. I nodded—yes, I recognize you—nothing more personal than that. Then he spotted Madeleine behind me, she was still buzzing with Mindy, and his focus narrowed to a fine point. If he had used his eyes that well onstage he might have made something of that character.

  Which was Guy’s problem in a nutshell. He could never see himself from himself. He created character from the outside looking in, he constructed a persona. Basically anyone can do it, politicians do it nonstop. It’s not, perhaps, a bad way to start. But Guy could never inhabit a character because he was himself so uninhabited. Nobody home, yet he wasn’t without strong emotions. I didn’t know that last part then.

  Madeleine released Mindy and threaded her arm through mine, rubbing my shoulder with her chin. Guy took this in with only a compression of his lips, but I knew he wasn’t pleased. I bent my neck to brush Madeleine’s hair with my lips, my eyes on Guy, and I smiled at him pleasantly, complacently, as a poker player smiles when he lays a straight flush upon the table.

  This brought him to his feet, narrowly missing the cleavage with his nose as he stood up. Madeleine noticed him and released my arm. “Guy’s here,” she said and in the next moment she was stretching up to plant a kiss on his rough cheek. His hand rested on her waist, his eyes closed as he bent down to receive her greeting, then he straightened up and held his hand out to me. “Teddy tells me you two are working,” he said. “That’s great.”

  “It is,” Madeleine agreed.

  I offered my hand and he grasped it heartily, tightly, and for just that moment too long that bespeaks the will to domination. “Give me the details,” he said. “I’ll make sure my agent shows up. She should see you two.”

  “That would be fantastic,” Madeleine gushed.

  “She’s terrific,” Guy assured us. “She’s opening doors all over town for me. I’m up for the new McNally next week.”

  While Madeleine expressed her delight at this prospect, I eased past Guy and made an excuse about my urgent need for a drink. Peter Davis was talking up the now neglected Sandy near the bar, so I pressed myself on them, keeping my back to the room. My emotions were in such a tangle I felt it would take a soliloquy of some duration to sort them out, but this wasn’t the time or place. Peter’s gossip was about Stella Adler, who had stripped down to some disheartening underwear in her effort to break an obdurate student’s performance. “No,” she shouted, lurching about the stage in her high heels, bra, and girdle. “This is boring, you’ve got to open up, you can’t be afraid, you can’t be timid and afraid, you must be naked in the theater, take your clothes off, you must be absolutely fearless and naked in the theater.”

  “She’s a genius,” Sandy said.

  I could hear Guy talking behind me; his voice had grown since he’d been absolutely naked on the stage and after every fifth word he said, “my agent.” At some point he exclaimed, “Oh, who reads reviews!”

  Teddy came up, rolling his eyes in disbelief at this remark and I put my arm around him, desperate for an ally. “Success spoils Rock Hunter,” he chortled and I said, “What was there to spoil?”

  Sandy, offended for her hero, said, “You two are like catty teenagers.” Then the room exploded with the primate roar of Guy Margate’s laughter.

  Later, as we undressed in my bedroom, I remarked to Madeleine that Guy was an intolerable blowhard.

  “You won’t think so if his agent takes you on,” she said.

  “His agent isn’t going to take me on,” I replied. “His agent thinks Guy is a good actor.”

  “So if she’s interested in you, you’ll turn her down.”

  “She isn’t going to be interested in me,” I said.

  And I was right, she wasn’t. She was interested in Madeleine.

  The criminal-bakery play received the mildest notices. Everything was “adequate” and “not without interest,” a few of us were “promising” and the playwright bore “watching.” Only “newcomer Edward Day” was signaled out for abuse. One reviewer described his performance as “erratic,” the other called him “a mincing, predatory fop.” Madeleine maintained that the latter designation might be a compliment but I knew better. The play was a flop but it ran its scheduled six weeks, each night to a smaller audience.

  One Saturday night as I was cleaning my face in the dressing room, Guy appeared at the doorway. The dressing room was a converted storage closet, scarcely wide enough for two to pass abreast, with a long counter, wooden stools, and a hazy mirror lit by a row of bare lightbulbs. As they finished their ablutions, laying aside their characters for another night, my fellow actors filed out in a gloomy procession. We had less than a week to go and we were all bracing for the plunge back into merciless reality where none of us had jobs. Guy spotted me and stepped inside. He looked big in that room and the garish light gave his skin a greenish cast. I was in no mood to accept the obligatory compliments he had doubtless come to offer, nor did I imagine he had any sympathy with my performance. He pressed against the wall, allowing one of my departing colleagues to pass, then claimed the vacated stool next to mine. “I’ve been arguing with my agent all evening,” he confided loudly. “She came to the matinee and she just didn’t get the play. I said, ‘Forget the play, what about the Day,’ but she said she thought you were muddled. What a stupid thing to say.”

  “Good night, Ed,” another colleague called to me as he went out.

  Before I could answer, Guy butted in. “Hey, good night. You were terrific.
”

  The poor fellow perked up at this praise. “Thanks,” he said, “thanks a lot.”

  I watched Guy in the mirror, wearily noting the resemblance between us, especially marked in profile. He was wearing a black turtleneck sweater which might have been chic were it not for the specks of dandruff scattered across the shoulders. As the voices of the actors in the hall were silenced by the slam of the heavy backstage door, Guy ran his fingers through the lank hair straying over one ear, tossing his head as he raked it back like an anxious ingenue. Was Guy anxious?

  I found I didn’t care. Lethargy settled over me, not unexpected, as I’d done the damned play twice in a day on very little sleep. I resented Guy shouting out his agent’s appraisal of me for all to hear. Surely my fellow actors were talking about it now as they rambled through the chilly night in search of a drink, agreeing with the criticism—Day is muddled; he’s dragging down the whole show—each inwardly wondering if the agent might have been impressed by his own performance. Better check the phone service before bed.

  I recalled, with grim specificity, the matinee. Matinees were never strong, everyone knows this. Old people with hearing aids come to matinees. Even if there was something to get in a play, which, sadly, in the thing about the bakery there was not, they wouldn’t get it, so why waste the energy. I routinely saved what I could for the evening performance. Why in hell had Guy’s vaunted agent chosen a matinee to check out my potential? I dabbed a tissue at the last of the cold cream near my mouth. Guy turned back to me. “I tried, Ed,” he said. “But she wouldn’t listen to me.”

  “Why did she come to a matinee?” I asked testily.

  He was distracted by his own reflection in the mirror. He frowned, first at himself, then at me. “She’s a busy woman,” he said. “She had to fit you into her schedule. I didn’t know when she would come. She only did it as a favor to me.”

  I chucked the tissue into the trash can. “Do me a favor, Guy,” I said. “Don’t do me any more favors.” Our eyes met in the mirror, mine a glaring hound, his a wounded doe. The favor he had already done me wafted between us like stage fog and I was back in the ponderous deep, gasping and thrashing for life. I seldom thought of that night, though occasionally it recurred in a dream from which I woke with a shout. In an uninteresting twist sometimes it was my mother who was drowning and I who was trying to save her. Guy’s gaze shifted back to his own reflection, which clearly soothed and pleased him, leaving me to glower at the unedifying spectacle of an actor admiring himself. He turned his cheek, raising his chin to take in the strong line of his jaw, giving himself a sly smile.

  “Who are you?” I asked. “Narcissus?”

  “The sad part,” he said, “is that my agent is right, your performance really is a muddle. You just don’t have a grip on that character, Ed, you’re all over the place with him and it’s not such a bad part. You throw that whole scene with the Mafia don away and he’s an excellent actor. He must want to murder you.”

  I snorted. “You’re killing me,” I said. Guy assessed the other side of his face. The stillness of the theater weighed down on me. All those seats, all those empty seats.

  “I was surprised, frankly,” he continued. “Madeleine has a high opinion of your work. I expected something better.”

  “God, I hate to disappoint you,” I said.

  “Has Maddie seen this show?”

  “She hates being called Maddie.”

  “Thanks for the tip. What does she think?”

  “You tell me.”

  “Would you like me to sound her out for you?”

  “Not much.”

  “I just don’t think this teacher you’ve got, what’s his name?”

  “Meisner. Sandy Meisner.”

  “Right. I don’t think he’s doing you any good. He’s got you all tied up in knots. I mean, you don’t look comfortable on that stage, Ed.”

  “You mean I’m not upstaging everybody with my cheap theatrics. I’m not waving my arms and bobbing my head around like a puppet; I’m not wagging my limp dick at the audience?”

  Guy thrust his face closer to the mirror and commenced probing the skin over his cheekbone. “Damn,” he said. “There’s a zit starting.”

  I stood up and pulled my jacket from the hook on the wall. I was uneasy about the next part. I couldn’t very well leave him in the theater—he had no business there—but I didn’t relish walking out with him. I had to turn off the dressing-room lights and walk about twenty feet in total darkness to get to the door. I paused with my hand on the light switch, looking back at him. “Go ahead,” he said. “I’ll follow you.” I flipped the switch and stepped into the black hole of the hall, expecting to hear his footsteps behind me but there was nothing. Instead his voice rang out, low and serious: “We’ve got to stop meeting like this, Ed.” It was ridiculous, it was actually funny, but there was something eerie and threatening about it that made me scoot for the door and fling it open with more than necessary force. Outside a lamp illuminated the shabby entryway. I leaned against the bar that opened the lock from the inside, gazing back into the gloom from which, all at once, Guy appeared, striding confidently toward me.

  “Let’s go to Phebe’s,” he said. “I’ll buy you a beer.”

  Madeleine’s play ran six weeks and got extended for an extra two. One reviewer found her “fresh” and “appealing,” another described her as “a young actress with talent to burn.” Guy’s agent, Bev Arbuckle, a deeply frightening redhead from Long Island, went to the show one night, liked what she saw, called Madeleine to her office, and took her on. Bev was certain Madeleine would do well in commercials and we had a long, difficult weekend of tears and protests before she agreed to try out for a few, which she didn’t get. We were back to the audition trials and it was clear that Madeleine was getting more try-outs and more callbacks than I was, but she was not gratified by this. If anything she was more apprehensive and desperate. This surprised me and it irked me: I was spending far too much energy trying to keep Madeleine’s ego properly inflated when my own was sagging well below the recommended pressure level. I listened to Madeleine’s side of panicked consultations with Bev on the phone and chewed my casserole to a monologue on the subject of Bev’s failure to understand the full dramatic range of her new client. Sex was still good and we resorted to it for distraction, which certainly beat television, but I found myself forestalling the orgasm because it meant we would have to go back to talking about Madeleine’s career. If I turned the subject to my own daily confrontation with oblivion, she reminded me that the theater was a notoriously hard taskmistress and that success was the exception to a whole universe of rules.

  We didn’t actually live together. Madeleine still paid rent on a two-room apartment she shared with a college friend where she dropped in once or twice a week, mostly to do laundry for us both, as I didn’t have a washer. She was reluctant to give the place up because the friend needed the rent and would be forced to find someone to replace her. So though she spent most of her nights with me, she wasn’t helping with my rent and it didn’t occur to her that she should. She bought and cooked most of the food we ate. Her repertoire was limited, pasta with sauce, vegetable soup, and macaroni and cheese. She was no longer a vegetarian, so once in a while she roasted a whole chicken and we ate that for a few days.

  Gradually we began to have arguments about small matters: the tea bags she left in saucers all over the place, the way I broke the spines of books by laying them open to mark my place. Sometimes when we went out for a beer, we sat at a table without speaking. Teddy came across us like this one evening at Phebe’s. He pulled up a chair and sat in the empty, silent space between us. “Trouble in Paradise,” he said.

  “What do you mean?” Madeleine asked.

  “Our lovebirds are not cooing,” he said.

  She looked at me quizzically; I raised my eyebrows and shrugged. “I’m just anxious about an audition I have tomorrow,” she said. “It’s a small part, but Bev thinks it could
be important.”

  Teddy patted her hand, all fake sympathy. “That is nervous-making,” he said.

  “Bev is nervous-making,” I said.

  Madeleine gave me a sharp look. “And what am I supposed to do about that according to you?”

  I let it pass and Teddy changed the subject. He’d just seen an amusing farce by Alan Ayckbourn in which a British actress spent the second act quietly attempting suicide while her friends, bent on kitchen repair, worked around her. Teddy described Stella Adler’s hostility toward British actors; in her view they were inferior and she mocked students she suspected of succumbing to their influence. When someone pleased her she said, “Yes, we will have great American actors.” Teddy did an impression of his teacher’s un-American pronunciation of the word “American.”

  “How old is she?” Madeleine asked.

  “Who knows?” Teddy said. “As old as God.”

  “No,” I said. “She’s older than Sandy and he’s as old as God.”

  “I hope I don’t wind up like that,” Madeleine said.

  “Like what?” I asked. “Old? It may be hard to avoid.”

  “No,” she said. “Old and teaching.”

  We nodded over our beers. Madeleine had summoned a specter no actor contemplates tranquilly. The personal lives of our teachers didn’t interest us; they existed, as far as we were concerned, only for what they had to give us. We treated them with respect. They could reduce us to quivering jelly with a harsh word. They had power; some were rumored to use it maliciously to elicit unhealthy dependency, as Strasberg was said to have done with the phenomenally talented Marilyn Monroe, but ultimately we believed our fate must be to leave them behind.