Weiskopf was twenty years older than I, in her mid-forties, lean, birdlike, nerves on her skin. She was afflicted with a face incapable of expressing affection; a sallow oblong, its brows pinched up the flesh of the forehead in permanent inquisition, while the lips, even in repose, were pursed and wry. Her accent was upstate New York, hard on the short A’s, nasal and ugly.
If you were to do her on stage, I think you would emphasize the arms, though. You would want to make her all arms, like a spider. Everywhere you went, the arms would go first, clearing the way or grabbing things. When you talked, the arms would do it, flapping like tongues, all the way from the shoulders. Then the audience would understand what she was about.
“So what have you got there, Doctor Weiskopf? Some kind of invention?”
Jerry said, “Come on, Doc, show him. Al’s okay.”
Weiskopf smiled. “Jerry tells me you’re an actor. Is that true?”
“Yeah, when I can get work.”
Eyes like lancets, Weiskopf leaned toward me over her half-eaten cheesecake. “I’m very interested in acting. I’m interested in what Stanislavski called sense memory.”
“Hmm.”
“You recover your own sensations and feelings, don’t you, actual memories? You invoke them inside yourself on stage, and that’s what makes the character real. Am I right?”
“Well, yes and no.”
Weiskopf sat back in her chair, deflated. “What do you mean, yes and no?”
“It doesn’t work that way, really. I mean, yes, you have to use sense memory, but that’s not enough. It won’t sustain you very long on stage. You’ve got to focus on your objective in the scene, and in the play as a whole. It’s your character’s objective that makes the real difference— that’s his life, not just some private experience.”
“I think you’re wrong,” Weiskopf said. “I think that the objective is secondary. It is the inner experience that makes something true or false.”
“You’ll never get beyond amateur theater that way.”
“We’ll see.” She stood up. “Come on. I’ll show you what’s on the other side of the wall.”
She hadn’t bothered to put in a door. With Jerry’s help, Weiskopf simply removed one of the four-by-eights tacked against the uprights, and invited me to step between the beams into the dark side of the garage. “You’re a friend of Goldeh’s, aren’t you? Jerry seems to think so. I know her from someplace else, actually.” I smelled pine first, then oil and ozone. I couldn’t see much; Weiskopf still hadn’t turned on the light. “She’s not originally from Poland or Germany, you know. She’s a Lithuanian Jew, from Kovno.”
“So what?”
The pull cord she tugged was a piece of twine with a large hex nut tied to the end. Weak yellow light stained the room. The shadow of the filament flickered across Weiskopf’s machine. It looked like an ancient, polished astrolabe, lapis lazuli and silver, set on a sundial with electronics mounted at six o’clock. Three red pinlights were already glowing. There was a console with meters, plugs, printed circuits, switches, a tiny keyboard, and one pair of earphones. I would not have thought someone at remedial eating level capable of such a work.
Before it sat a space-age swivel chair with arm supports and leg supports and adjustment knobs at every joint. The luster of her machine was so otherworldly that I thought for a moment that it was a trick, a holographic projection, or undigested cheesecake befuddling my senses; I didn’t notice anything else in the room for a long time. The light came from bare, unfrosted bulbs hanging from cords along the rafters. When I did notice the rest of the room, which was not until just before we all left, I saw that it consisted only of card tables full of hand tools and metal junk flowing over onto the floor, broken concrete stained with motor oil.
Jerry smiled so broadly the nose ring transited his upper lip. He gave my shoulder a puppy shove. “What do you think?”
“What does it do?” I stuttered. Weiskopf was pleased. Jerry pranced around the machine, admiring it from different angles, sometimes nearly touching it but never quite daring; he cackled the whole time we were there, like a baby googling at a pretty rattle.
“It rectifies history,” Weiskopf said. “It’s a sort of time machine.” She was very good. She was underplaying everything now. She knew she had me, like a skillful lover easing me into the finish with winks and twitches, using my own energy to explode me. “I can’t say it’s completely original. I picked up bits and pieces everywhere I’ve worked, the Brain Research Center at the University of Rochester, Bell Labs, the Livermore of course…”
“You’ve worked at all those places?”
“In menial capacities, yes. When Jews didn’t keep me out, men did. So I typed, cleaned, assisted, whatever gave me access to the data and to the thought processes involved. They were intimidated by my intellect. You men don’t like that in women, do you?”
Relax. I am intelligent, urbane, a great conversationalist, looks like Clark Gable’s. Women flock to me like moths around a flame… or something. “I love it,” I said, and she smiled—most of the cheesecake mustache was gone now. “But what do you mean, ‘rectifies history’?”
“Sit down.” I sat in her swivel chair as she cranked up or down my head, my feet, my pelvis. “How’s that? Comfortable? Is that good?” I thought of dentists’ chairs and catafalques. “Now tell me,” she said, “as an actor, you must have explored your childhood experience to some degree.”
“For character background, sure.”
“I thought so. In your memories of childhood, have you found any irrational events? For example, I myself have recalled finding the same teddy bear at the bottom of a toy chest three times in a row—this is when I was four, I think—removing it each time and putting it on a table, without ever putting it back. I know that’s impossible, but up until a year ago, I had a very clear image of it.”
“What happened a year ago?”
“That’s what I’m going to show you. Do you have any memories like that, crazy childhood images you know to be false, but that are in your mind anyway?”
“Yes,” I said. “As a matter of fact I do. Once, when I was three or four— I mean, this is how I recall it—I saw a friend of mine fly up into a loft, not jump, fly. I used that one in a Saroyan one-act.”
“Crazy, isn’t it?”
“Who knows?”
“Now watch. This is perfectly safe.”
“It really is!”—Jerry from the shadows—“I’ve done it. It’s great, Al!”
Weiskopf stabbed two buttons, then typed. There was a monitor, but it wasn’t responding directly to the keystrokes; it look more like an oscilloscope or an electroencephalograph. “Please put on the earphones,” she said, “if you’re game.” I put them on, and the pattern on the monitor immediately shifted. The doctor typed, and the wave pattern split into a dozen horizontal waves; actually, there were more—Weiskopf scrolled through scores of them, selecting the ones that interested her, and preserving them on the screen.
“Is that me?” I said.
“Look!” Jerry squealed, delighted. He bobbed in and out of view like a poltergeist in the harsh light and deep shadows of the naked light bulbs and the monitor’s green glow.
Whenever I spoke, a pattern on the screen changed. In fact, as I thought, the pattern changed. “I don’t like this.”
“Oh, it’s nothing.” Weiskopf was busy. “Don’t worry. I can’t read your mind, if that’s what you think. But I can tell you are relaxing very quickly.”
That was the right thing to say to an actor. Appeal to the ego, even in small things. Like a dentist praising you for opening your mouth well. Modestly: “I meditate.”