“All right,” he said, and nodded briefly, and glanced at the jukebox, as though fearful even his song would run out too soon. He nodded again. “Who?” he said.
“We thought Terry Brown.”
“Have you spoken to him?”
“No, not yet,” Beth said quickly.
“Is he in town?”
“I think so.”
“Well, go on, call him then.”
“Danny, I wish...” Beth started.
“Call him,” I said.
She sighed, and nodded, and said to Edward, “Have you got a dime?” and then she went to call the man who would save my play.
We stood together, Beth and I, at the rear of the theater on opening night. I could see Natalie sitting in the sixth row center, flanked by my parents on her left and her parents on her right. She was wearing a long green velvet gown, pearls at her throat. She looked as beautiful as she had almost twenty years ago when she’d walked over to me in the small park outside N.Y.U., wearing sweater and skirt, put her hands on her hips and said, “My friend Nancy said you wanted to know my name. Why?” As radiant as that.
We knew, of course, five minutes after the curtain went up. The first laugh line rushed past without a titter from the audience, and I felt Beth stiffen beside me, and actually crossed my fingers, something I had not done since I was a boy of seven. And then another laugh line followed, with no response from the audience, and the actors felt the apathy and began pushing, playing it more broadly, forgetting what the play was about, concentrating only on getting those laughs when they were supposed to come, estranging the audience completely. By the time they got to the serious stretch in the middle of the first act, they had alienated everyone in the house. The audience was coughing and sniffling and stirring restlessly when the first act curtain fell.
I took Natalie’s hand as she came running up the aisle. Her eyes were wide with questions. I nodded and said, “Natalie, I think we’re dead,” and she squeezed my hand and said, simply, “Yes, Gene.”
We went backstage to talk to the actors between acts, encouraging them, telling them everything was going fine, just don’t press, the audience is loving it, we’ve got a sure hit on our hands. And the actors, flushed with the excitement of the night, involved in performances they had been preparing for six long weeks, believed every word we said and went out prepared to clinch their victory in the next two acts.
I met Beth at the rear of the theater.
“Do you need a drink?” she asked.
“I think so,” I said.
She took my arm, and we went across the street to Ho Tang’s welcome dusk. The jukebox was silent. Neither of us put any money into it. We sat at the bar and ordered our drinks. Beth was in a black gown with a diamond pin just below the yoke. I was wearing a dinner jacket and a frilled shirt, and the studs and links Beth had given me as an opening night gift. We raised our glasses and touched them together, and Beth said, “Here’s to the next one, Gene.”
“To the next one,” I said.
We drank.
“It’s a goddamn rotten shame,” she said.
The reviews would come in much later that night, we would hear them read to us over the telephone from the Times and the News and later the Post, and then we would actually see the morning papers and read what we had earlier heard on the telephone, and we would commiserate into the night while the celebration party at Sardi’s dissolved and eventually disappeared around us. But we would be numb by that time, and so we sat in Ho Tang’s now and shared the death of the play together, and for the first time in a long time, we talked about other things, my children and the fact that Sharon had to have her tonsils out, the difficulty Beth was having getting a maid, the chances of the Mets this year, how lovely the weather had been this past week.
We both drank more than we should have, not going back to the theater for the second-act curtain, trying to obliterate what was happening across the street, and finally succeeding. Awash at last in boozy self-pity, I put four quarters into the juke, and we listened solemnly to the music, and nodded a lot, and stared mournfully into our glasses, and sighed, and ordered more whiskey, and began talking in an endless drunken round I will remember quite forever, despite my own drunkenness.
“Did we do the right thing?” Beth asked, and put her hand on my arm, and leaned into me.
“I hope so,” I said, and tried to light a cigarette.
“No, tell me,” she said. “Did we do the right thing, Gene?”
“I don’t know.”
“It was difficult.”
“It was very difficult, Beth.”
“Do you know how difficult it was for me that night?”
“What night?”
“The night we told him.”
“Very difficult,” I said.
“Yes, but do you know how difficult?”
“How difficult?”
“We were lovers,” she said.
I was looking full into her face, she was leaning very close to me, clinging to the bar and my arm, her eyes misting over. “Danny and I,” she said, and I nodded, and she said, “Long time ago.”
“Listen,” I said, “maybe we ought to get back.”
“Back where?” she said.
“Across the street.”
“What for? Nothing’s changed across the street.”
“Even so...”
“Nothing’s changed.” She lifted her glass, drained it, and put it down on the bartop. “I’ve never been lucky with men,” she said. “Never. Do you want another drink? Two more,” she said to the bartender. “Lasted longer with Danny than I thought it would,” she said. “I met another man, an instructor at Yale, I was up there trying out a new show. In New Haven, I mean.”
“Yes,” I said.
“And we fell in love.” She shrugged, looked to see if the bartender was fixing our drinks, and then said, “We were living on Fifty-eighth Street at the time, Danny and I. Little apartment on Fifty-eighth. I drove down from New Haven at three in the morning. On the Merritt. You know the Merritt?”
“Sure, I know the Merritt.”
“It was empty. This was three o’clock in the morning. Danny was in bed when I got back to the apartment. Everything was very quiet. I had to tell him. I figured that was best. Not to lie about it, not to pretend everything was... the same. So I sat on the edge of the bed, it was very quiet, I don’t know, it was almost, I don’t know, the building was so still. I said, ‘Danny, it’s finished.’ ”
“Martini straight up, and a scotch on the rocks,” the bartender said.
Beth picked up her glass. She sipped a little of the whiskey, and then said, without looking at me, “Danny wouldn’t believe it. He said, ‘No, Beth, it isn’t true.’ It was so goddamn quiet in that building. I told him there was another man, and he just kept saying, ‘No, no,’ and you could hear this awful silence everywhere around us, as if the world had already come to an end. ‘No, no,’ he kept saying, and I said, ‘Please understand, Danny.’ ”
“Let’s get back,” I said. “Beth, I want to see what’s happening.”
“So last week, I did the same thing to him all over again. And I asked him to understand again.” She lifted her glass and drained it. “I did it for your play,” she said.
“I know you did.”
“I don’t mean hiring him. That was for me. To square it, to make amends for having kicked him out. Give him something back, you know? A chance. But firing him was for you and your play.” She shook her head. She was very close to tears. I kept watching her. It all seemed suddenly senseless. The play across the street was a failure.