Valerie Martin Read online

  “Somebody’s got to teach,” Teddy said ruefully. “Acting is an art, after all.”

  Madeleine’s eyes drifted toward the windows. Outside a couple clutching their coats against a gust of wind struggled by. The temperature was dropping steadily; the first hard freeze was predicted. “I really want that part,” Madeleine said.

  What strikes me when I look back over these pages is not only my ignorance, which was prodigious, but my myopia. This is always the case with hindsight, when the inevitability of choices that seemed difficult and complex is revealed to have been obvious. I wanted to be an actor; I needed to act, to play a part; and I was driven by an ambition I scarcely understood. I knew that great acting is an art, one which requires dedication, study, and patience. I was open to learning everything I could in any way possible, that was my strength and this openness drew the best teachers to me. It was this and not my talent that excited them. At that time I had not found the teacher who, as the Buddhists remind us, appears only when the student is ready. She was waiting for me.

  I was frustrated by auditions and my classes bored me; the relentless exercises that led to small moments when, egged on by the relentlessly nagging Meisner, I had a momentary revelation of the depths I would have to mine in myself if I was ever to act fully. I wasn’t afraid; it was just such hard work and I was often physically tired from my jobs, and from keeping Madeleine on an even keel. Sandy said things like “Edward, I don’t know why you can’t just look at that table. Is there something that’s keeping you from looking at the table?” or “Mary, that was good, you were urgent, it was good. Ed, try joining her there.”

  “I don’t think Sandy’s the right teacher for me,” I told Teddy, but he only smiled and said, “He’s as good as any.”

  Meisner was well loved by his students and occasionally successful actors returned for a tune-up with him, especially those who had been working in television and wanted to recover their energy because the daily grind of TV was so deadening. One chilly December morning the news was that Marlene Webern, a fine stage actress who had been appearing in a popular television drama about a hospital, was among us. She enjoyed directing improvisation exercises and, after consultation with Sandy, posted a list of students invited to participate. To my surprise, my name was on it.

  Marlene was in her early forties then, though of course she didn’t look it, and she had a long career both behind and before her. The first time I saw her she was seated at a table in the wings of a makeshift stage, turning over the pages of a script. Her heavy red hair was pulled back in a ponytail; she wore a white men’s-style shirt, jeans, and a pair of short red boots, the exact shade of which was matched by the polish on her fingernails. There was a pitiful low-wattage lamp to read by so she was hunched over the page, her brow furrowed above a pair of bifocal glasses. As I approached, she whisked off the glasses and her face came to life, though her eyes were still unfocused. Her smile had about it, always, I was to learn, a trace of sadness. “Who are you?” she asked.

  “I’m Edward Day,” I said. “Is this where the improv session will be?”

  “Is that your real name?” she asked.

  “It is,” I said. This meant Marlene Webern was not her real name but I didn’t pursue it. Later I learned her name was Cindy Webewitz and that she came from the Bronx. Another student arrived and another until we had a troupe of eleven. Marlene herded us onto the stage, announcing that we would do a warm-up called “catch.” This was a silly business in which the actors stand in a circle while one among them assumes a peculiar posture and movement. “Mark,” Marlene instructed, “start with a chicken.” Mark stretched his neck up, thrust out his butt, flapped his arms, and turned his legs into strutting sticks. He bobbed his head, making chicken clucks, and bopped into the center of the circle. After a bit of preening he approached a pretty young woman named Becka, who responded with a quick peck and screech, took on the chicken, entered the circle, and modified the movement into something slithery and reptilian, which she then passed on to me. I turned the snake into something, I don’t remember what, passed it on, and so on. Actors love this sort of thing; it limbers the instrument and allows for fierce grimacing and eye flashing. Marlene got something piggish, transformed it into an insect walking on water, then snapped abruptly back into Marlene and said, “That’s good.” She went to a table and took up a folder of pages which she handed out to each of us. “These are the improvs,” she said. “There are six of them. They’re all two-person scenes, so pair up. I’ll have to do one too; Ed you be with me. We’ll do number four.”

  All eyes shifted to me momentarily, and then there was a brief hum as we read over the pages and couples gravitated together. Marlene assigned random numbers and sent all but the students assigned to the first exercise into the audience.

  They were clever scenes. I don’t remember much about the others, one was an argument in a bar, and in another a man didn’t want his wife to know what (or who) was behind a curtain. But I recall every detail of my own. It was the improv that changed my life.

  The scenario was elaborate. I was a young man named David who wanted to go to Japan and become a monk, but I didn’t have the money for a plane ticket. I sneaked into the kitchen of my mother’s house and there on the table was her purse. I decided to steal her credit card; she came in and surprised me in the act. Marlene would be my mother.

  As the others created conflict and comedy and pathos from thin air on the stage, I tried to work my way into a condition of such desperate urgency that I would steal from my mother. I kept my real mother in a safe place; I seldom took her out to look at her and this bit of fluff with Marlene Webern was clearly not an appropriate venue for delving into that dark and painful cache of emotion memory. I understood that I would never have stolen a dime from my mother, no matter what my condition, so there was, in addition, no point in dredging about in my own past. I queried my character, who was my own age and determined to make a complete break from the world as he knew it. He wanted to be in Japan, and he wanted to be there right now. Why? Because he had failed somehow, because he regretted actions he couldn’t repair. What sort of actions? What would make me desperate to enter a monastery in Japan? I must have betrayed someone, or someone had cruelly betrayed me, but who and how?

  I was getting nowhere and the scenes were ticking by. There was a round of bright applause. “All right, Ed,” Marlene called to me as she dashed up the steps lugging a large red purse. “You’ve got to get to Japan. Chop, chop.”

  Everyone laughed. I followed, stumbling behind her. I’d done this sort of thing before, we all had; exercises of this kind were our daily bread, but I felt unprepared and anxious. I’ve got to get to Japan, I told myself. I must get to Japan, today. If I can get the money now, I’ll make the plane. I have a reservation; my bag is packed.

  Marlene put her purse on the table and pulled it open, producing a leather wallet from inside. “This is my wallet,” she said. “The credit card is inside.” She dropped the wallet into the capacious purse. It had a satchel-style opening which she snapped closed. “You’ll have to open the wallet to get the card,” she added needlessly. “You come from there”—she pointed to the wings offstage right—“and I’ll come from this side.”

  I went into the wings where I stood for a moment pulling my cheeks down with the palms of my hands. I’m desperate, I thought. I’ve got to get to Japan. I know Mother won’t want me to go, she won’t help me, but if I could get her credit card somehow without her knowing, I could pay for the ticket. I’ll pay her back later, once I’m settled in Japan. I stepped onto the stage and there was the table with the purse. All I had to do was open the wallet and get the card. I paused, listening—was she nearby? Was she even in the house? But there was nothing. Now’s your chance, I advised myself. Do it quickly. I rushed to the table and snapped open the purse. It was crammed with stuff, makeup, a checkbook, pens, wadded tissues, a tin of mints, but the wallet was riding on top of it all and I snatched it, glan
cing behind me, though I knew very well that Mother wouldn’t surprise me from that direction. That backward glance stymied me—it was forced, something from vaudeville, the anxious thief fearing apprehension. I imagined Meisner chortling at my ineptitude, my loss of focus. The wallet, I thought, just get the card before she comes in. I lifted the snap and the wallet flopped open like a book. There were three credit cards on one side, the shiny edges visible above the thin leather sheaths, like toast in a toaster. On the other side was a plasticized pocket designed for a driver’s license. My eye was drawn to this because it displayed not a license but a photograph of a naked woman. She reclined upon a couch, odalisquely, her red hair loose and waving along her shoulders, her chin lifted and her eyes gazing into the camera. Lovely full breasts with unusually pale nipples. My God, I thought, this is Marlene.

  Should I be seeing this? What was I to do? Get the credit card, I reminded myself. This is a trick; she’s playing with you. Get to Japan, that’s all that matters. Take a card, any card; take the green one, that’s American Express, good round the world. I extracted the card and dropped the wallet back into the purse as if it was burning my fingers, which it was. A titter of laughter from the audience exasperated me. What were they laughing at?

  Though I didn’t register the roar from the wings as human, much less female, I heard Marlene before I saw her. She burst upon the stage brandishing a board as long as she was tall and she came straight at me in a fury that no one would mistake for an act. My brain, confused beyond endurance, concluded that she was angry about the photo. But how could that be, she’d put it there, she knew I would find it. “Get out of my house,” she bellowed. I backed away as she lowered the board, leveling it at my head for what promised to be a mighty blow. “Mother,” I cried, staggering, but she kept coming. My knees buckled and I sprawled to the floor, covering my eyes with my hands. “Don’t hit me,” I whimpered.

  “David?” she asked incredulously. The board, inches from my face, shifted to the right and came down with a crash on the chalky stage planks. “Oh my God, David,” she said. “It’s you. What are you doing here?”

  Tears burst from my eyes; my heart hammered in my ears. I tried to sit up but an emotion of such helplessness and guilt overcame me that I rolled onto my side, clutching my knees to my chest, my head to my knees. The sharp edge of the credit card—I was still clutching the credit card—pressed into my cheek. “I’ve got to get to Japan,” I wailed.

  “What are you doing?” she cried. “Are you stealing from me? David, are you stealing from me?”

  Then it was over. I got to my feet and tried to defend myself for my action. Marlene demanded the card; I refused to give it to her. We had a brief tussle over it, but it was all acting. I was even conscious of the audience, my fellow students, and I knew they knew we were just winding down, cleverly, skillfully, but that for that one moment when I fell to the floor in terror and shame, I’d found that for which we all strove, a pure emotion expressed in my own person. There had been no space between my character and myself. I hadn’t considered what David might do, or what I might do in David’s place, I had simply cried out in David’s voice, David’s desperation, which was my own. Anyone watching understood that something real had happened in the last place one might expect to find it, inside an actor, on a stage.

  Marlene stopped the scene with a raised hand and a sharp “That’s it.” My fellow actors burst into wild applause. I realized that I was sweating, that my knees were still weak, my heart racing. The whole business had taken about four minutes. I bowed stiffly and Marlene said, “Well done, Ed.” I took her hand and kissed it, gratitude flooding up from the bottom of my soul. “Thank you,” I said.

  “My pleasure,” she replied. I raised my eyes to her bemused, almost tender smile. She was pleased with herself and with me. It had been no accident. She had taken my measure and contrived how best to get me to the place I needed to be. The photo, so startling and confusing, the furious board-wielding territorial mother, it was all of a piece. And of course, because of what she had put me through and because of what I now knew about myself as well as about her, I was in love with her.

  ———

  Winter dragged on. I had a small part in a play about García Lorca which got no reviews. In the spring, desperate for an Equity card, I did the group auditions for summer stock. To my surprise I secured a place at a playhouse in Connecticut.

  In my first summer at college I had worked as a technical intern at a summer theater in upstate New York, so I had some notion of what to expect. We interns were the equivalent of a Suzuki orchestra of ten-year-olds, grinding out Bach on tiny violins with no idea of theory or art, running on the enthusiasm of being young and attached to a real stage. We were turned loose in an old, run-down hotel a long walk from the theater. The walls were peeling, the water was rusty, and the kitchen was inside a cage constructed of chicken wire to keep out the raccoons which patrolled the place so stealthily and determinedly that if one of us failed to secure the latch at night, in the morning it looked like a band of crazed drug addicts had staged a break-in. The clever creatures opened every door, including the refrigerator, as well as every box, jar, and carton. What they didn’t eat, they scattered, and what they scattered, they pissed and shat upon. Hostilities broke out between those of us who carefully secured the latch, hoping to preserve our little stashes of comestibles—a process that required threading a length of wire through two holes—and those who couldn’t be bothered. Signs were posted—FASTEN THIS GATE YOU JERK—and scrawled over with tart graffiti. Those determined to prepare decent meals (coffee and sandwiches was the platonic ideal, though one sad, anorexic girl, the child of divorcing parents who didn’t care to know exactly where she was, lived on nothing but cereal for two months), tried securing cabinets with metal ties and clamps. One boy bought a steel box with a padlock in which he successfully stored a loaf of bread, but it was a pitched battle and for the most part the raccoons were the victors. My roommate opened the refrigerator one morning to find a raccoon inside, leisurely finishing up a package of sliced ham before making an escape. A sweet high-school student from Ohio was reduced to tears when she found the contents of a tea tin scattered across the linoleum in partially masticated clumps. “My aunt brought me that tea from England,” she whimpered. “I only got to have one cup.”

  The actors were lodged in small apartments in town or in cabins in the woods. Being New Yorkers they were made anxious by the proximity of so many trees, terrified of the deer and the occasional bear, and paralyzed by the swift descent of the deep, black, unilluminated nights. Our leading lady had to be escorted, shrieking at every rustling bird or cavorting rabbit, by a phalange of techies from stage door to cabin.

  Three days after we arrived it started to rain and it didn’t let up for the rest of the summer. The theater was a well-designed, decently equipped proscenium that seated upward of three hundred, and our actors, if they found their way to rehearsals, were serious professionals. But the weather took a toll and when we were finally up and running we played, night after night, to audiences of forty or fifty who looked on like lost children in the wilderness of empty seats. Their applause sounded like dried peas rattling in a tin can.

  This time it would be different. The playhouse in Connecticut was an old and respectable one, and I wouldn’t be there to carry coffee, drive nails into frames, or escort nervous drama queens. I would be one of a company of actors. We would do four plays in three months and I would have a part in every one of them.

  It meant being apart from Madeleine, a prospect I viewed with equanimity. We were having constant squabbles, some of which escalated into storms so furious even sex couldn’t calm the water. In April she got a small part in a comedy she and Bev thought was poor, but it paid union wages so she couldn’t turn it down. She spent hours waiting around for the five minutes a night (ten on Saturday) when she was onstage. I was looking for someone to sublet my apartment and she didn’t like that. She felt our spac
e would be invaded and violated by a stranger and would thereby be unrecoverable, but she didn’t want to give up her shared place and couldn’t afford to pay two rents. I put the word out at school and of course a beautiful neophyte actress from Georgia snapped it up, which put Madeleine in a state. “What am I supposed to do?” I reasoned. “Pay rent on an empty apartment in New York? No one does that, Madeleine. I can’t afford it even if I wanted to do it, which I don’t. Be reasonable.”

  “It’s not about reason, Edward,” she snapped. “It’s about feeling.”

  “Feelings don’t pay rent,” I replied.

  One evening, just a few days before I was to leave for Connecticut, I went out with Teddy for Chinese food. He was on the outs with Mindy and his father was bearing down on him to give up acting and pursue a “real” career. “Mindy takes his side,” he explained over his mo shu pork. “She thinks I should go to law school. Then we could get married and she could be an actress and I could sue the producers who try to screw her.”

  “She wants to get married?”

  “To Teddy the lawyer, not to Teddy the actor.”

  “Is she that blunt about it?”

  “Pretty much. Yes. You know Mindy she doesn’t mince words.”

  “Are you seriously considering this?”

  The waitress, an adorable Chinese with a long braid and quick, furtive eyes, brought another round of Tsingtao. “I’m seriously considering asking this lovely young lady what time she gets off,” he said.