Valerie Martin Read online

  “You are an actor,” she said in unaccented English.

  “How can you tell?” Teddy asked.

  “I saw you at an audition. Last month. It was at La MaMa.”

  Her name was Jasmine and she got off at ten. We drank beer and ate almond cookies until she was free and then headed over to Phebe’s, where I was to meet Madeleine after her show. Before we left Jasmine introduced us to her aunt, Mrs. Lee, who owned the place and insisted on mixing up a round of Chinese cocktails for us in the kitchen. “Lychinis” Jasmine explained. “A lychee martini.”

  “Jasmine is great actress,” Mrs. Lee informed us as we sipped the strange concoction. “But theater very hard for Chinese. No parts.”

  It was a gorgeous night; the trees, such as they were, had unfurled their delicate sap-green leaves and exhaled chlorophyll-scented oxygen into the atmosphere. We agreed to walk uptown rather than descend into the underground where breathing was a necessarily shallow affair. I expanded my chest, opened my arms to the invigorating air, and declared the lychini the liquor of the gods. Teddy observed that on this fair night in this part of town one could actually see the stars, and we paused on the curb to gape at the heavens. “’Twere all one,” Jasmine recited, “that I should love a bright particular star and think to wed it, he is so far above me.”

  “Are you in love?” Teddy asked.

  She smiled. “On a night like this I could be. Don’t you think I could be?”

  We marched on, combing our brains for tributes to the stars. Teddy, overexposed to show tunes by his connection to Mindy, crooned, “Today, all day I had the feeling, a miracle would happen,” which put us on the track of the most mawkish song we could find. By the time we got to Phebe’s we were on “Some Enchanted Evening,” and we burst into the nearly empty bar proclaiming, “Fools give you reasons, wise men never try.” A few diehards nodding over their drinks ignored us, the bartender rolled his eyes. Madeleine, alone at a table with an empty glass before her, regarded us so sourly that Teddy muttered “Good luck” and steered Jasmine to the far end of the bar, leaving me to my fate. I leaned over the table, my eyes moistened by the smoky pall that hung upon the air. “Hey lady,” I said, in a low-life pitch somewhere between Brando and De Niro, “can a fella buy you a drink?”

  My queen was not amused. “Where have you been?” she asked. “I’ve been waiting for over an hour.”

  “We walked from Chinatown,” I said. “It’s a beautiful night, didn’t you notice?”

  “I’m tired,” she said. “My stomach hurts.”

  “Well, have a drink with me and we’ll walk home and you can go straight to bed.”

  She glanced at Teddy and Jasmine, who were perched on stools, chatting up the bartender. “Does Mindy know about that?”

  “That’s Jasmine,” I said. “We just met her at the Chinese restaurant. She’s an actress. What do you want, sweetheart? Have a liqueur; it will settle your stomach. Have a Sambuca.”

  “OK,” she said. I went to the bar and answered Teddy’s inquiring look with a thumbs-up all clear. When my drinks came, he and Jasmine followed me to the table where the introductions quickly yielded to the important info that Madeleine was tired because she had a job and had come straight from the theater.

  “I’ve heard about that play,” Jasmine exclaimed. “You’re in that play? That’s so cool. I really want to see it.”

  “It’s a small part,” Madeleine demurred.

  “I really want to see it,” Jasmine repeated.

  “Our Madeleine plays a maid of easy virtue,” Teddy said, keeping the subject where we both understood it needed to be.

  “Typecasting,” I joked.

  Madeleine flashed me a look that made my stomach tighten. “What are you talking about?” she said.

  “Mitt Borden is the lead, isn’t he?” Jasmine said. “He’s fantastic.”

  “What are you talking about?” Madeleine persisted, glaring at me.

  “Just teasing, love,” I said.

  “What’s he like?” Jasmine asked, but Madeleine ignored her. “Did you see him in that Wilson play? I thought he was hot.”

  “He’s a good actor,” Teddy agreed. “He’s got a lot of presence.”

  “He stinks,” Madeleine said, releasing me from her cold inspection.

  “You don’t think he’s good?” Jasmine asked.

  “He’s an OK actor,” she said. “I mean he smells bad. He doesn’t wash enough.”

  “Oh. He stinks stinks!” Jasmine cried, collapsing into charming, girlish giggles.

  When was the last time I’d seen Madeleine laugh with such simple openhearted glee, I thought. She watched Jasmine’s amusement with a chilly, distant smile. She was angry at me for my remark; she had passed over it for now but I knew I’d hear about it later and I was right. On the walk home she was silent, loading up her argument, and when she got to the apartment she opened fire. I had as good as called her a slut in front of someone she had just met. It was clear I would only make such a remark to let Jasmine know that I was not in any way attached to Madeleine, that everyone knew she was sluttish, which simply wasn’t true. I had no reason to make such a charge, it was outrageous and uncalled for and she wasn’t going to forgive me for it. I defended myself indifferently, apologized insincerely in the hopes of toning down the scene, but she was having none of it. It was clear to her that I wanted to go to Connecticut just to get away from her and prove to myself that I didn’t need her. Well good, that was good. I should go ahead. That was fine with her. She was too busy anyway; her career was the most important thing and it was obvious that I was jealous of her because she was talented and ambitious. By this time she was weeping and trembling, genuinely exhausted, so I got her to bed, protesting my affection for her, cradling her in my arms until, in the midst of snuffling tears, she fell asleep.

  I got up and fixed myself a drink. She was right, of course. I was tired of the relationship. I had been for some time, and all I really wanted to do was get through the next few days without more hysterics, get on the bus, and head for Connecticut.

  On the morning I left, Madeleine was subdued and remained so until I packed my old suitcase, kissed her goodbye, and hopped on the bus. I was in a cheerful frame of mind. I didn’t know who the other actors would be, but there was always a star or two, older stage actors or television actors desperate to play a scene without someone yelling cut and eager to be nearer the city where real theater still more or less thrived. Agents routinely toured the summer productions and there was occasionally a new play, which meant spending time with an ambitious playwright, always an interesting opportunity for an actor.

  A theater functionary met me at the station and drove me to a rambling Victorian rooming house with a long porch across the front straight out of Thomas Wolfe. “Here we are,” the driver informed me.

  “Very Thomas Wolfe,” I remarked.

  “The actors all seem to like it,” he assured me. “Most of them are here.” The porch screen drifted open revealing a stunning young woman, all golden curls, honey skin, and startling green eyes, dressed in a white halter-top dress that reminded me of the bubbling skirt Marilyn Monroe famously battled down against the subway draft in The Seven Year Itch. She flashed me a camera-ready smile and stepped out into the light. “I’m Eve,” she said.

  “I think I’ll like it just fine,” I told the driver.

  From there things got better. Eve escorted me to my narrow room just three doors from hers, and left me to “get settled in.” On the pine desk I found a folder packed with useful information, including a list of all the actors in our company. Here I learned that Eve’s full name was Eve Vendler and that she had studied at Yale. I didn’t recognize any of the other names, save two. One was Gary Santos, an actor I’d seen in a good production of Joe Orton’s play Loot in some miserable little theater downtown. The other was our star, the talented stage, film, and television actress who, it turned out, had a long association with this festival playhouse and was ret
urning for her sixth season, the immensely talented and widely acclaimed Marlene Webern.

  The first cast meeting was the following morning. As the dress code was casual, I pulled on a T-shirt, my most faded madras shorts, sandals, and in case of overactive air-conditioning, the linen jacket, and went forth confidently to join my company. The rehearsal shed was a short walk from the boardinghouse and we actors went over in a troop, chattering away with introductions and gossip. Gary Santos, who was there for a second season, enthused about the venue and praised the talent and temperament of our star. “Marlene is great,” he declared. “Nothing pretentious about her and she’s brilliant.”

  I said nothing, as I doubted that Marlene would remember me—though she had, in the brief encounter we had shared, changed my life—and I didn’t want to embarrass myself by suggesting a connection where there was none. But when the time came and I stood diffidently before her, protesting that it would be unlikely if she recalled our little scene together, to my delight, she claimed me. “Of course I remember you, Ed,” she said. “That’s why you’re here.”

  That’s why you’re here.

  Close your eyes and imagine you are standing before a strange door in a whirling snowstorm. Your fingers are numb; you’re frozen to your bones and hungry as well. The door swings open upon a sunny, tropical isle, birds are singing, exotic flowers nod in the soft breeze beckoning you, a table is spread with a magnificent feast. Bathing beauties, if you like bathing beauties, emerge from the calm waters calling your name. Ed, you’re here, at last, you’re here, we’ve been waiting for you, that’s why you’re here. In just that way Marlene’s greeting caught me by surprise and I blurted out, “That’s great,” much to the amusement of my fellow actors who took me for an innocent. And so I was, so I was. But not for long.

  We did four plays that summer; one was a musical, Dames at Sea; two were insipid pieces in which I had negligible parts; and the fourth was Tennessee Williams’s Sweet Bird of Youth. I was cast as Chance Wayne, chauffeur and paid gigolo of the drug-addicted, over-the-hill screen star Alexandra del Lago, also known as Princess Kosmonopolis, played by Marlene Webern. Eve, the delicious Eve, was my long-lost sweetheart Heavenly Finley Mine was a plum part albeit one in which I was castrated onstage every night. The play felt seriously dated even then; now it seems like some embarrassing relic. The shock value of drugs and venereal disease had faded through the ’60s, but Connecticut audiences were perfectly content to have their prejudices about the Deep South confirmed and chalked the strangeness of the play up to its author, that gay blade who doubtless knew everything there was to know about VD and drug addiction.

  Marlene was perfect for her part and she knew it, but I was miscast in every way, including the color of my hair. Chance Wayne is so golden the ladies talk about it; it’s one of his great charms. I assumed I’d wear a wig, which worried me. A wig is a big deal, a serious distraction. I’d need to wear a wig night and day for a week at least just to get past it, or get even with it. So I was relieved, early in the rehearsal period, when the director took me aside and said, “I’ve made an appointment for you at the salon in town. It’s the Wee-Hair-Nook on Main Street. Just show up at two o’clock and ask for Beatrice. She knows what to do.”

  One really must admire the persistence and imagination of women when it comes to approximating their ideal self-image. Beatrice was an artist and the challenge I presented excited her. She laid swatch after swatch of fake hair against my cheek, from champagne blond through honey to strawberry, with variations in between so numerous and slight I couldn’t detect a difference. “This one’s a little cooler,” she said, or “This is pushing toward red.” She kept returning to a panel of haystack yellow. “With your eyes and skin, I’m thinking we can go Scandinavian and get a real natural look.”

  The process was horrific, toxic, vile smelling, with a long stint under a dryer so hot I thought my scalp would fry. But when it was over and Beatrice pulled the towel away with a flourish, I gasped at the rakish fellow in the mirror. “I’ll be damned,” I said. “It’s fantastic.”

  Beatrice beamed at me, drawing a few damp curls over my forehead. “There’s a blond in all of us,” she said. “We just let him out.”

  Back at the theater my colleagues were agog. “I didn’t recognize you,” Eve exclaimed. “It makes your face look bigger.”

  “You’re standing different,” Gary Santos observed. “Are you conscious of that?”

  Then a rich, theatrical voice called from the stage. “Is that Chance? Is that my driver, Chance Wayne?”

  “At your service, Princess,” I said, turning to Marlene who looked me up and down so ravenously I felt a blush rising to my cheeks. “I have such a weakness for blonds,” she said. “I fear it will be the death of me.”

  I pressed my fingertips to my lips, regarding her coolly. “You could be right about that, Princess.” She shook her hair over her shoulders, reminding me of the photo she’d tantalized me with at our first meeting. It was then I decided I would have sex with her and soon. Chance Wayne wasn’t a guy who would wait around for the prize to fall from the tree and I was, at that moment, feeling just as useless, hungry, stupid, hot, and blond as Chance Wayne.

  As everyone knows, in my profession we go around screwing each other as much as possible, mostly to see ourselves do it. Narcissists are always making love to number one. Eve was a perfect example. I asked her to my room to share a bottle of wine and she was in the bed and down to her lacy underwear before she finished the first glass. She disported herself charmingly, wiggling around to present her various assets as if there was a paying audience seated on the dresser. She made interesting noises and urged me on with cries of “Oh my God” and “Do it.” Afterward she wanted a cigarette, but I didn’t have one. She pouted her pouty lips. “Eddie, I really need a cigarette,” she said. So I got up, put my clothes on, and walked down to the general store to buy a pack. On the walk back, I found myself thinking of sex in general and Madeleine in particular, definitely a different ball game from Eve. More inhibited but, oddly, more intense. Eve had no shame, which wasn’t as much fun as it should have been. It struck me that she might wind up in porno films, and in fact, this turned out to be an accurate prediction.

  Eve was entertaining, but my real goal in the sexual stakes game was Marlene Webern. Marlene wasn’t just a different ball game, she was a different planet, and one not easy of access. In public she flirted and teased, it was part of her role as Alexandra del Lago, and we enjoyed bantering in a familiar way, as if we had actually driven into town from the Gulf Coast, stopping over at chic hotels where we took drugs and she was serviced by me at considerable expense to her pocketbook and my self-esteem. It was tantalizing, but we were never alone. After a week of rehearsals I noticed that she contrived to keep it that way and I resolved to break her will.

  This wasn’t easy. As the star she received special perks and was much in demand. She was lodged in a private guesthouse tucked into a garden behind a mansion on the green in town. The owner, a patron of our theater, occasionally sent a chauffeured car to pick her up after rehearsal and whisk her off to private dinner parties with the local elite. When she was reduced to dining with the rest of us, she was seated next to the producer or the director, both of whom were clearly in love with her. I couldn’t get next to her, except onstage, where we were very close indeed. We spent the whole first scene sparring in a hotel room. I held her in my arms, she examined my bare torso, I picked her up when she fell on the floor, and at the end, after we agreed that we were both ashamed of our degraded connection, I got in the bed with her and tried to make her believe, as she put it, “that we’re a pair of young lovers without any shame.”

  In the Broadway production Chance closes the hotel shutter on this line and the stage goes dark, but that was in the ’50s and this was the ’70s. Audiences wanted to see actors making out. It was fine with me. All I had to do was call up the photo I’d seen in her wallet and I was eager to clamber on top o
f her and try to remove her blouse. The look she gave me as she held her arms out to me was such a combination of fragility and appetite that it touched my heart and my groin at the same time; who wouldn’t want to make love to such a look as that.

  We weren’t exactly the people we were playing, a washed-up star and a boastful neophyte, but we could certainly imagine the desperation that would drive these two together. Marlene opened her lips beneath mine and arched her spine as I slipped one hand around her back and pressed her thighs apart with the other. She was wearing a cotton T-shirt and jeans, so it wasn’t as if I could really get anywhere, and the director always interrupted too soon with his “Good, that’s it, that’s hot.” We sat up on the bed, side by side, disheveled and overstimulated. Marlene came back to herself in an instant, patting down her hair, blowing out a puff of air as she lifted and lowered her shoulders. It wasn’t so easy for me. I tried not to listen to the riot in my senses as the director droned his notes for the scene.

  Scene I was fine, it’s well written, lots for the actors to do, but after that the play is pretty much downhill. Nothing fazed Marlene; her character was entirely in place and she was convincing no matter how bizarre or nonsensical the requirements of the role. She made it easy for me; she let me act around her solid interpretation and if I came up with anything new, some little insight into my character, she followed me like a willing dance partner. We searched for Chance Wayne together. I couldn’t decide how dishonest he actually was. When he said he’d slept “in the social register” in New York, was that true? Was he in the chorus of Oklahoma! as he bragged he had been, or was even that small distinction beyond him? Did he have an Equity card? One day when the director told me my “YIPEEEE” sounded like a death knell I spoke up. “I don’t get it,” I said. “Why would I brag to this famous film star that I was in the chorus of Oklahoma!? Am I so stupid I think that’s a big deal? Did I actually do it, or did I just try out for the chorus and didn’t even do that? I know I’m a loser, I’ve got that, but just how big a loser am I?”