And he would have won. He was sure of it, if only the frustrated dresser hadn’t tired of asking an uncooperative actor to cooperate and pushed Benji’s head where he wanted it to be. By the time Benji looked up, finally fully dressed, Kay and a tiny (but much needed) victory were gone.
He snatched his helmet with an acidy burp and rattled out the door to find her. The hallway hummed with preshow activity, but it wasn’t the melee that pressed Benji flat against the wall. It wasn’t the gaffer, Bill Turnbull, hauling his salami-scented bulk at improbable speed in search of a missing cord, or Delores Henderson-Cratch, denizen of regional summer stock and obsessive pacer, who liked Benji almost as much as Kay did and closed her eyes in a show of pained forbearance whenever she saw him. It was the fact that fifteen minutes ago, he hadn’t known just how drunk he was. Fifteen minutes ago, before the image of his stage manager had fanned out and filled the doorframe, Benji felt as fine and together as a compromised man of compromising compulsions was likely to feel. But now, like the cartoon coyote that falls into the canyon only after he realizes he’s been hanging in midair, he suddenly sensed trouble. Could the awareness of being drunk make him drunker? Maybe. Maybe not. But he did have the distinct impression that the floor listed beneath him.
Delores passed in her state of momentary blindness, worrying the train of her gown and reciting, with something approaching religious fervor, the tongue twisters that loosened her “instrument”: You know New York, unique New York. You know you need unique New York. Benji’s feet moved two quick steps to the right in a reflexive little jig to keep up with the shifting floor. He leaned into the wall and breathed, his helmet dropping to clatter against his boots. A gulp of fresh air and he’d be back in business. A few minutes under the wakening stars, possibly a private moment behind the Dumpster — two fingers down the throat usually found a reliable reset button — and still he’d have time to give Kay a piece of his mind.
He psyched himself up to let go of the wall and plunge into the stream of actors and stagehands rushing for their places, but then she was beside him, making it impossible to move, saying his name.
“Are you all right?”
Ophelia. Catherine. Cat. Although Benji could number the interactions they’d had that strayed beyond niceties and weather reports at exactly three, she nevertheless remained his favorite person in the cast. This, he liked to think, had more to do with admiration for her talent, with her charming and — especially among the Kiss-Ass Crew — refreshing lack of pretense, than her tight, yoga-built body or disarmingly perfect ass. The startling green of her eyes reminded him of a marble he used to carry for luck, and her boyishly short blond hair not only was sexy in a Mia Farrow circa 1968 sort of way but, more practically, made bearable the nightly tussle with an unflattering and complicatedly braided wig. At twenty-five — which in some people’s books placed Benji in a defamatory chapter on cradle robbing — with a BFA fresh in hand from Carnegie Mellon and an impressive list of roles already under her belt, Cat displayed the centeredness and self-possession of a considerably older woman. At first, with her taste for boldly patterned wrap dresses, he’d pinned her closer to thirty, which, for a man two months shy of his fortieth birthday, would have put her just this side of datable. As if age, Benji admitted, was the hurdle he had to clear.
He hiccupped. “I’m fine.”
“You don’t look fine.”
With a gauntleted hand, he tugged at the immovable collar of his metal suit. “You want to grab some air?”
“They just called places. Ten minutes.”
“Ten minutes,” he drawled, as if elongating the words would have the same effect on time. “Did I ever tell you about Arthur?” he asked, though he knew perfectly well he never had. He himself hadn’t thought of Arthur Billings in years and wouldn’t have been using him as an opening gambit if 1) the lunchtime tide of liquor had not totally washed away his inhibitions and 2) Jerry had not brought him to mind earlier that afternoon. But Jerry had mentioned Tenafly, and it was Tenafly, or “Ten Swamps,” as the Dutch called it — the things Benji remembered! — that provided the dreary backdrop for young Arthur Billings’ boyhood. Benji could hear Billings now: the melodramatically inclined chair of the Skidmore theater department where Benji had spent all of three semesters liked nothing more than sharing with his students scenes from what he referred to as “his very own eighteen-year-long O’Neill play.”
“You must have had a teacher like him,” Benji said, without bothering to elaborate on the kind of teacher he was. “He always said you can fit actors into one of two slots. Those who act because they want you to look more closely at yourself. And those who act because they want you to look more closely at them.” The weight of the armor made him lean to one side, putting him a conspirator’s length from Cat’s ear, in the bright, herbal halo of her shampoo. “The first is harder to come by. Most of us — me, I — most of us want a spotlight. We’ll eat our mail, if someone will watch us doing it. You smell good.”
“Benji.”
“But you. Something happens to you out there. I’ve watched it. You’re here, talking to me, okay, maybe you’re just being polite and listening to me, but then you’re — you’re show me the steep and thorny way to heaven. You’re gone. And all anyone sees is a sister fighting with her brother over whether she’s in love with the right guy.”
Cat narrowed her eyes. She was gracious and kind, Benji knew, but she wasn’t about to be flattered into ignoring the obvious. “You’re drunk,” she said.
Benji’s face broke in a spasm of feigned incomprehension, which Cat good-humoredly mirrored. “Really?” She laughed. “You really want to pretend it’s my judgment that’s impaired? You want to be that guy?”
“No,” Benji answered, chastened. “I don’t want to make you feel impaired.”
Cat bent down and picked up the helmet. She opened and closed the metal visor before passing it into Benji’s hands, then turned and walked away.
“Come on. If I can get over you”—he paused, carefully choosing the bait for the end of his line—“you know, laughing at me—”
To his surprise, she stopped and snapped it up. “When did I laugh at you?”
“Really?” Benji parroted. “You really want to be that girl? The day I walked in on everyone in the green room. I know what Hamlet was doing. I get it. It’s laughable. Snow Day 2 isn’t exactly — well, it isn’t exactly Hamlet.”
“How do you know I wasn’t laughing at Hamlet and his need to laugh at somebody?”
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. “You’re saying you weren’t laughing at me?”
“I’m saying if I was, it wouldn’t be for Snow Day 2.”
With renewed command of his stewed muscles, Benji set the basinet firmly on his head and slapped the visor shut. That Cat might lift the slit plate and plant a tender, mollifying kiss on his mouth was probably too much to ask. Just barely, he saw the white of her dress slipping like a ghost across the narrow field of view. He flipped the visor open in time to see her duck behind a heavy black curtain at the end of the hall. There stood Kay with two of her minions at a waist-high table, guarding the passage like some mythical three-headed beast. They consulted the ponderous binder that held her script, turning the pages thoughtfully, not unlike a small coven poring over their spells. In her smug willingness to lump him together with Bonaduce and Coleman and the burned-out stars of eighties TV — the dangerous, the debauched, the disgraced — Kay lodged like an allergen in Benji’s nose. His eyes went teary, as they did before a good sneeze, with the need to expel it. Part of him wanted nothing more than to march forward and tell her where she could stuff her wiki, but a sudden sloshing wave of gastrointestinal distress threatened to carry him off in another direction.